Used & Rare Books

Whether you're looking for a first-edition Jack London or an armload of affordable children's books, a selection of high-quality art monographs or your favorite mystery series, Copperfield's Used Books offers more than 40,000 titles to select from. Our buyers are committed to stocking the shelves with a full range of subjects, from art, history, science, and spirituality to all genres of fiction and poetry in the best possible condition. You can find them in our Used & Rare bookstores in Sebastopol and Petaluma or online.

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End of The World, and I feel fine

The bookstore has always been a refuge for browsers and a special delight to writers. Graham Greene commented on the demise of many of his favorite bookshops following the bombing and the post World War II economy. His observations for different reasons parallel what’s happening today; whether from the internet or the fast approaching digital book revolution the familiar terrain of bookstore and bookseller is vastly changing. It’s no longer bombs, but our high tech economy.

When asked how the book business is doing and, specifically, how my used bookstore is faring, I usually answer with this analogy:  Imagine a livery stable owner circa 1905 standing in front of his shop bemoaning the fact that business is down.  Oh, there’s still plenty of shoeing and every now and then a high end saddle sale but what’s up with all these horseless carriages?  For the modern day bookseller, those that survived the great internet purge during which four to five thousand new and used bookstores vanished; survival has meant embracing the internet.

Internet sales at my bookstore have climbed steadily from 2 percent to almost 40 percent of my monthly gross. Walk-in business has slowed considerably, while sales of rare books over the same period dropped from 20 percent to 2 percent.  Month to month, compared with years past, I’m flat but stable.  The internet has changed how we buy books. We’ve gotten much pickier. In general the books are cleaner and newer. Hardcovers sell in non-fiction sections, but in literature, unless it’s a classic like Hemingway or Steinbeck, they’re doorstops.  With the middle class no longer collecting, I shy away from most collectibles and first editions because unless it’s a very fine example or inscribed by the author there are no buyers.  Additionally, since the selling price has fallen, especially on the net, so have the percentages we pay: 15 to 20 percent of cover instead of 20 to 35 percent.

I used to be a bookseller, now I am an uploader.  I feed the internet beast 100 to 200 books a day but still this beast is never satisfied.  Some days I seldom venture beyond the confines of the beast feeding machine.  Hyperbole aside, we try to upload as much of the stock as possible.  Most everything has an international standard book number (ISBN) which makes it easy to scan.  For the few books we buy without an ISBN, our sales program Fillz provides a quick manual template.  Fillz also enables us to sell through multiple channels like Amazon, Alibris and Abebooks by collating order and shipping information.  Pricing can be tricky - it’s always a dance between what you paid for the book, the average selling price on the net and what the local market will support. 

Before the internet a store was stocked with mostly older out-of- print titles, each section as wide and as deep as possible.  Customers, who came in to browse, spent hours examining the shelves with the intent of seeing and perhaps in hope of a serendipitous find. There used to be great regional variations in the stock so that those who traveled were more often than not rewarded with finding an item scarce back home. The internet changed all that by democratizing the stock.  Many items once thought scarce plummeted in value once tens if not hundreds of copies from around the country were uploaded to the net.  Our sections now reflect more paperbacks, current and popular titles leavened with a selection of the best out-of print titles in excellent condition at competitive prices.  With fewer used stores people don’t have many places left to sell their books.  This means the remaining stores are inundated with stock and lately it’s been an absolute treasure trove.

I’ve begun to notice more and more orders shipped to local addresses, from towns within easy driving distance of the store.  It’s a little sad for two reasons: first we lose 20 percent off the top of every internet sale to aggregators like Amazon. Second, folks don’t seem to browse bookshops any more.  Bookstores are made for browsing.  Nearly every phone call we field deals with either, “when do you buy?” or “do you have this specific book?”  Consumers don’t want to hear “I don’t have that particular book, but I do have an entire section of books on the subject, some even better than the one you are looking for.”  Nope, they are on a mission- next stop: Amazon.

We are on the verge of a new world, becoming a people who scan our way through life in downloaded snippets. The e-book is one of the ways this change, in how we look for and digest information, manifests itself.  Presently only 2 percent of the market, the ridiculously high priced textbooks and scholarly volumes make it obvious that the first significant penetration for e-books will be at the university level. For publishers and new bookstores owners this creates an air of panic.  The $9.99 per download model is a price point publishers cannot match with their hardcovers whose price relates to author advances. And if they do decide to price analogous with downloads, then hardcovers become a $9.99 loss leader and new book stores suffer, as those books currently account for 40 percent of their business. Worse, how will authors deal with rights management and royalties when peer to peer sharing networks start trading digital files of books?  Conversely, used stores should be able to compete if the price remains $9.99 per book download.  The majority of my used stock, whether mass market pocket books or the larger trade paperbacks, is already consistently priced below that.  In the near future, a kiosk utilizing a print on demand system will print your book while you wait, for the same price as a download. This virtually guarantees that cheap paperbacks and the resell market I depend on won’t disappear anytime soon. Eventually, the market may split 50/50 between print on demand and e-books. 

Bookstores that will survive--be they boutique shops for the tourist, high end collector shops for the wealthy or the lucky few stores that will flourish in high urban traffic areas and small downtown communities--will sell online, offering in-store prices competitive with the net and the coming e-book. And they will continue to be social meeting places for readers who like exchanging ideas and books.  Students will continue to come in for cheap paperbacks of assigned classics and may discover, like their parents, the fine art of browsing.  Stores cannot survive on the internet alone; walk in traffic is critical.  We can offer the best selection and premium customer service but you still need customers. Like Graham Greene, who searched for surviving shops among the ruins, as long as there are people whose curiosity and sense of adventure outweigh common convenience, and as long as bookstores remain a nexus for socializing, there may yet be hope. After all we still have horses.