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Kindle or Not, a Resurgence In Used Bookstores
The growing availability of books via internet (whether instant, in the form of downloads from Amazon's Kindle store or the Google Play store, or in physical form by post) puts pressure on conventional bookstores. The Washington Post reports, though, that some bookstores are thriving, and some new ones are getting started, in a particular niche: used books. The phenomenon springs in part from the disappearance of many large chain bookstores, leaving gaps that smaller and nimbler shops can fill; as the article points out, a used bookstore in many places is the only one around. Nonetheless,
It is by no means an easy business. Many used-book retailers — with either bad management or bad locations (or both) — still struggle against the digital headwinds.
For one, Amazon is still just a few clicks away. But some used-bookstore owners have made a shrewd move: widening their customer base by listing their inventories on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, an idea many new-book retailers despise. (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos.)
My favorite bookstores have mixed stock (used and new), serve coffee, and specialize -- the process of discovery is still easier at a place like Ada's Technical Books in Seattle than it is browsing through Amazon recommendations.
They are DRM free. You can share them with whomever you want. You can beat up people that don't return them. Go watch The Princess Bride. Lot's of reasons they are still read, and therefore produced.
Absolutely. Plus we can reread them in 5yrs, 10yrs... And they are still there in the event of power failure and other tech failures.
Not that we don't need ebooks. Both is better.
This is 2015. Why are books still being printed on paper?
Because a lot of people like them that way.
But here's a puzzler: This is 2015. Why are people still asking stupid questions?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
They are DRM free. You can share them with whomever you want. You can beat up people that don't return them. Go watch The Princess Bride. Lot's of reasons they are still read, and therefore produced.
And...
They don't need a battery. Ever.
They don't break when you drop them, even from heights that would turn a Kindle into a bag of shards.
The feel good in your hands.
The TSA won't make you take them out and "turn them on" when you fly with them.
You can share them with your children and instill a love of reading in them.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
To expand on Junta's comment; drm free, no internet connection required, no subscription fees, no electricity required, easier to search, easy to use "hands off", can be a tactile experience, easier to read in daylight, and easy marginalia..
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Or the stoarge format changes and renders e-books unreadable.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Let's Not Forget that a pre-requisite for owning a Used Book Store is the proprietor must be clearly insane. I don't mean that he or she would "have to be crazy" to be in the used book market in a "market" sense ... I mean that if they were not certifiable lunatics, they would not even consider possessing large quantities of used books sufficient to offer them for retail sale. Plus, the inventory multiplies like rabbits, since they sell one used book for every 20 used books they buy.
One of the big issues Used Book Stores have to deal with are commercial leases ... they are not necessarily ideal tenants because the weight of the product they sell is probably higher than just about any other product, and that includes New Books, since resellers of new books generally make an effort to have the inventory look good, versus stacked 10 rows high covered in dust with extremely narrow shelf pitches making browsing difficult except for the super skinny.
What they have going for them as tenants is they are very reluctant to move. So shady landlords love them, since the leaseholder is putty in their hands. Want to raise the rent? Go ahead, and make it unreasonable while you're at it. 50/50 they will pay rather than move.
Unreadable? My girlfriend had her kindle for a day before she found some software which could not only strip all the DRM for any formats, but freely convert between them all and plain text.
At the moment this is as solved of a problem as DVD-CSS.