(He's still alive and kicking. I bought a secondhand book from a random eBay seller the other year and it turned out to be him. Quite a shock.)
That aside: I find it hard to believe the assertion that "the number of second-hand bookshops in the UK had increased by about 25% over a thirty year period". All the areas with which I'm particularly familiar saw a notable decline in this period (some almost precipitous, such as Oxford or Uppingham). My gut feeling is that Driff's 80s guides were not as comprehensive as the poster believes, and that the advent of the internet has made it much easier to compile complete, crowdsourced directories such as thebookguide.info.
I suspect this may be part of the case; though doesn't the UK have some master list of companies? Maybe that could be searched.
In my local experience in the US Barnes and Noble and Borders killed all the non-second-hand bookstores, and then Amazon mostly killed those, but some of the second hand bookstores have survived.
Also, do you count Goodwill as a "second hand bookstore"? They have usually two or three aisles of books, after all.
It returned 3,437 results for me, but this will include inactive companies and chains, and exclude unincorporated shops. Tax records might be more thorough, if there are a lot of unincorporated companies or sole traders that file tax returns, but I don't think those records are public.
I don't know much about the book industry specifically, but I'd be worried about the viability of second hand book shops in street-level retail environments because of rapidly rising commercial rents in many big cities.
The revenue brought in by a second hand book store may be sustainable in a much smaller city with static/non rising commercial rents, but when a commercial landlord looks at lease renewal and decides they can get a whole lot more money if somebody converts the place into a small restaurant, coffee shop or (other) retail...
> a commercial landlord [...] somebody converts the place into a small restaurant, coffee shop
Charing Cross Road in London is a prime example - used to have a whole bunch of small book (and other) shops. Now it has a whole bunch of pastry, coffee[1], sweet etc. shops and a couple of small bookshops (who probably don't have long to go, really.)
(Also has a huge bookshop, Foyles, but that's a soulless corporate monstrosity.)
[1] I am particularly aggrieved about the nicer of the two Any Amount Of Books being turned into a squashed coffee shop.
Foyles was interestingly weird but eventually got bought by Waterstones and became what it is now. I’d still say it’s better than some, just not by enough.
The expensive building changes to the Chinatown side didn’t help the smaller shops and it’s clear as their leases end the shops are closing and it’ll be like everywhere else with a generic mash of forgettable places.
Had a friend who worked in foyles packing mail outs. He used to get his jollies writing author sigs and dedications on the books.
Married a bookseller who worked at skoob, Sicilian avenue. The owner had worked next door to 84 charing cross road. We avoid second hand bookshops now, you can grow out of them.
Everyone raves about hay. The QT is on petersfield and the honour box system.
Petersfield is a wonder. The way it unfolds. I saw a full folio copy of Dante's Divine Comedy with Doré's woodcuts in there for £80... three decades ago? I'm still kicking myself that I didn't buy it.
Same here for a bookshop in Brisbane with pugin architectural drawings, and a bookshop in York which had Mervyn Peake original pencil drawing of his son for £300 in 1981
Same with Denmark Street with instruments. When the premises are worth millions it's not surprisingly that minority shops cannot break even. They either need to be owned by the very rich as hobbies or will be bought up by chains. I think Stanfords is still there nr Covent Garden though, that was always a favorite a in some ways an only option for expedition planning pre internet/google earth.
Often, commercial landlords allow for less-profitable shops because they drive traffic to your more profitable tenants and generally improve the value of the other properties around it.
It is very obvious when this is not done, because you end up with cities like Toronto where there's a plethora of streets with nothing but a chain coffee shop, a chain pharmacy, a dry cleaner, and a dentist; but absolutely nothing that would be of interest or unique.
It is often the case that bookshops and the like are not paying commercial rent. Either the shop-owner owns the building or the actual owner is happy to charge them less than commercial rates.
The building may also be have problems that prevents the owner renting it out to a "full price" tenant.
This is the majority of the ones that I personally know of - the shop-owner IS the building owner, and runs the bookstore as a personal side-project they enjoy.
If you can avoid rent/mortgage, many businesses suddenly become viable. If you have to compete with other rent payers, many businesses die, and the street becomes nothing but bank offices, lawyer offices, and maybe a Starbucks.
One day we will return to valuing a rich commons enough to price it in. (An existing example is like parks etc. We are rightfully not rushing to let them be converted/developed, even in NYC)
Instead of subordinating the commons to whatever the biggest amount of nameless faceless money happens to be in the area.
I recently visited Paris for work and was struck by the number and quality of small local book shops, often seeming to specialize in one thing or another, as compared to where I live (SF). Prior to that I had always thought that SF had a lot compared to elsewhere.
There’s probably several factors, including Paris population density (highest in Europe if I remember well), 50%+ car-less families (you can see people reading in the metro), and the fact that literary prizes are evening news worthy events (cultural effect of books and authors being important even to non-readers)
But one really important structural factor is that books must be sold at the same price, by law, everywhere (+/- 5%, price fixed by the publisher. So you may pay -5% on Amazon or a retail chain like FNAC compared to a local book shop). This law dates back from the 80s, when book shop retail chain FNAC started to get very successful.
Add to that a very efficient book logistics system, and it’s often as fast and nearly as cheap to order a book and get it at a book shop than with Amazon.
It’s not all rosy as the system is very concentrated and vertically integrated on the publishers and distributors (wholesale) parts. These publishers+distributors combos get the major part of the revenues, and it’s in their interest to push a crazy number of new books every year (with something like 30% of the stock getting destroyed every year. Book shops can send back books easily and get refunded)
Authors and book shops, at the two ends, get a very small percentage of the revenues. French authors are totally dependent on their publishers for every step, from editing to publicity, and usually license all rights from the get go. Book shop have very small margins (I read around 2%!) and even just loosing thrillers or another popular segment to ebooks might make hundreds of book shop collapse ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’…
It’s actually almost the same in Germany. I don’t know the details, but we have fixed prices (no +/- wiggle room) and the rest of your post rings true. Though independent book stores have been dying with mainly major chains surviving.
This is only for German books, though, foreign languages are not affected by the fixed prices.
> Though independent book stores have been dying with mainly major chains surviving.
This isn't surprising - larger chains can get economies of scale and spend that money on hiring the best staff / more marketing / more locations / lower delivery costs / faster delivery / nicer shops.
Smaller shops not being able to charge more for their books sounds detrimental to their survival.
The lack of fixed prices would have killed them even faster. It’s not big chains killing them, it’s that only big chains manage to hold on to life vs Amazon & Co.
We have had some kind of fixed book price regulation since 1888 (yes, that’s an 1800, not 1900).
> the fact that literary prizes are evening news worthy events (cultural effect of books and authors being important even to non-readers)
That's probably true in many (most) European countries? Certainly true in ones I know - UK and Poland. It stems from leftist/socialist politics on the continent - the authorities sees their role not only as a policeman/arbiter of people's affairs, but also as a force of enlightenment, promoting education, higher culture etc. Hence, things like literary awards, classical music etc. get a lot of state funding. I'm not entirely convinced it's that great, because for example my taxes are, year after year, funding the local opera in my city (requires large subsidies as ticket revenues are nowhere near enough to cover the costs), of which I will never have any use, as I'm not interested in opera.
On the other hand, if, say, an opera cannot attract a sufficient audience to balance their books, why should they be kept afloat by the taxpayer (who obviously isn't interested otherwise there would be a sufficient audience...)?
They must be forced to program at least a sufficient number of popular and commercially successful shows to pay the bills and finance the more demanding ones (to continue on the opera example).
It's not necessarily about making money but the market does not lie: To be able to balance the books is the acid test when it comes to seeing if there is an actual, viable interest in something.
I'm not against operas existing, I'm only against them being funded by people against their will. There are many alternative models available - funding via donations from rich people (how it's done in the US), or de-profesionalization of opera (having volunteers with day jobs sing in it, if the ticket sales are not enough to pay their salaries).
My mother worked as an artisan in a theatre before retirement(I'm Polish BTW).
Just like public transport, opera and theatre can't possibly fund itself just from tickets - the price would need to be very high to do so.
At the same time donations from rich people are few, far between and wouldn't even cover 1% of the expenses - it's not the XX century anymore and even then I suppose instances of rich people funding entire such organisations were rare.
Most musicians (and I've met quite a few during my time in a choir), especially singers already have a day job.
In general it boils down to whether you believe a nation has culture worth preserving or should they all just shut up and produce GDP.
> Just like public transport, opera and theatre can't possibly fund itself just from tickets - the price would need to be very high to do so.
Most things can't fund themselves with tickets. That's why most things that could theoretically exist (if we had infinite resources), don't exist in practice. Why should we make exceptions for things like professional opera and professional theatre? I for one am a big fan of Magic: the Gathering, and would love more MtG events in my city - but I'm not expecting the government to fund them.
> At the same time donations from rich people are few, far between and wouldn't even cover 1% of the expenses - it's not the XX century anymore and even then I suppose instances of rich people funding entire such organisations were rare.
Perhaps it's a sign that opera or theatre are really a thing of the past and hardly anyone cares about them anymore? Well-known polish actor (Jerzy Sztuhr) mentioned once that what he liked about Italy is that going to the opera was part of upper middle-class snobbery there. It was just expected of you, if you wanted to believe to a certain social strata. He liked it, because it meant more funding for his profession - but is it good for society? Shouldn't people do the things they like and not the things that they expect will make impressions on others? Sounds like a miserable way to live to me.
> In general it boils down to whether you believe a nation has culture worth preserving or should they all just shut up and produce GDP.
At least in my city, most of what is played in my local opera house are foreign operas (https://opera-slaska.pl/spektakle)... So, large part of the money goes to preserving the culture of other nations.
Also, a country having culture does not mean that money must be spent on it. Plenty of culture can be made without any monetary exchange. In fact, that's how culture was made through the majority of human history - people playing music at their houses, or doing amateur theatre in their village or town etc. In fact, that tradition died very recently, with wide dissemination of commercial music via radio (1920s in the US, little later in Europe). Since then, people preffered to sit and passively listen to a broadcast of a recording of some professionals doing music, instead of doing it themselves. Before that, up to the beginning of XX century though, town were full of music made by people themselves.
> Why should we make exceptions for things like professional opera and professional theatre?
Because that is our cultural heritage and it at least preserves the know-how necessary to perform it.
It's notable that our most prestigious cultural event - the International Chopin Piano Competition - is largely publicly funded.
You can think of it as a form of branding - just applied to entire nations.
> Well-known polish actor (Jerzy Sztuhr) mentioned once that what he liked about Italy is that going to the opera was part of upper middle-class snobbery there.
I happened to have spent four years in Bologna - exactly where Stuhr went in the 80s - and have been in the opera there because my neighbour(old man) had an, ahem, monthly subscription of sorts, which awarded him discounts and he invited me along because his wife couldn't go that time.
Does that strike you as an upper-middle-class thing?
My experience is that especially in Italy people participate in culture much more than around here - it's what makes their national brand strong despite longstanding economic issues.
> At least in my city, most of what is played in my local opera house are foreign operas
Most of the artistic value in opera is the performance which, looking at the cast, is still firmly Polish. Singers often sing in languages that are entirely foreign to them - even if there's a sizeable amount of material written in their own.
> Just like public transport, opera and theatre can't possibly fund itself just from tickets
That's not true.
Operas and theatres can fund themselves. But subject to 2 key points: They need to program a sufficient number of popular shows that will turn a profit (an experimental avant-gardist performance might not sell out, a popular comedian might, popular and famous shows/musicals in London's West End or NYC's Broadway are raking it in), and the number of venues must be commensurate with the actual demand.
Fine but then this is a choice and the theatre should take responsibility, and that might mean closing down... Honestly that sounds like an elitist, a bit snobbish, attitude ("we won't lower ourselves to making popular shows" sort of thing)
Here in the UK venues have very popular pantomine shows ("pantos") for children/families at Xmas. They are not serious and often slapstick comedy but they sell tickets and fill the room.
Sometimes you have to make airplane noises to make a baby eat its food in the same way you have to convince the broader public that money isn't the only thing that is important in life. Family, friends, art, nature and philosophy are more important than making money, though seldom realized until people are on their death beds... I've never heard of anyone laying there dying saying, "I should have devoted my life to making more money", but those that did often wish they devoted their life to one of the items in the list above.
To only do the things that are useful and profitable inevitably takes us to dead-ends where humans end up behaving like little more than animals in the jungle, the law of the strongest, living for the next meal and reproduction, surviving and that's it.
Most of it can be seen as finite games in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games .
But culture can be on another level. It's an investment in the possibility that we can progressively do better than mere animals - that we can realize our human potential.
That's why culture exists, it's a difficult and hardly profitable work in progress for our improvement as a species.
There are lots of places that don't have operas, you could move there. You are likely to miss out on some other services though, that's life, you gotta take the good with "the bad", opera in this case.
Maybe, but compared to the US they're hotbeds of rampant leftism. Probably a good 1/3 or more of UK conservatives would vote Democrat if it came right down to it.
Compared to the US, almost everywhere in Europe is a hotbed of rampant leftism. The US Democratic Party is pretty right wing by European standards, and arguably more right wing than the UK Conservative Party. But compared to the rest of Europe, Poland and the UK are right wing.
I don't know details about UK, but Polish labor laws are quite strong (in terms of protecting the workers), which is no suprise, given that they were created in 1974, i.e. under the Communist regime (similar for public housing, education, tenant protection etc. BTW - all written by communists and not changed much since). I wouldn't be surprised if they were stronger than in Denmark or Sweden, where the policies (from what I've read) focus on helping the unemployed/laid off, but don't meddle into the employee-employer relationship as much.
There's really no strong correlation between communism and strong labour laws. In the Soviet Union and China labour had/has almost no real legal protections. Likewise Vietnam. The argument being that the party literally embodies the will of the workers by definition, so those limited labour protections that do exist at the local level are co-opted by the party machine and not actually controlled by labour at the local level.
Poland had a much stronger local union structure, along socialist lines outside party control, which is why Solidarity union activism was possible. My knowledge of that time in Poland is pretty limited though.
> It stems from leftist/socialist politics on the continent - the authorities sees their role not only as a policeman/arbiter of people's affairs, but also as a force of enlightenment, promoting education, higher culture etc
I highlight that for our republican readers of the Americas
I mean, it sounds very nice in theory, and is nice to some degree in practice (having free, decent university-level education, up to masters and phd level, is amazing), but, underneath it, there are strong classist assumptions. The authorities must assume that they're the smarter/better than regular people and they know better what is good for people that the people know themselves. They're basically modern neo-aristocracy, and, in for example Poland, they are often explicitly descendants of the land owner families of old (when nobles' land was confiscated in the XIX century, the noble/land owner class transformed into leftist inteligensia class, whose one of highest ideals was bringing englightenment to the unwashed masses). In UK, it is even more obvious, as the landlords' lands were never confiscated and the aristocrats are still there, playing huge role in politics. All in all, completely different history and dynamics than in the US, with a completely different result.
This idea of remaining aristocraties/bourgeoisies isn't solely a Continental Europe thing, all things being considered. The US also has its dynasties in politics, culture/media, and industry -- Clintons, Rockefellers, Kennedys, etc.
Wherever you are, wealth and power accrue and are inherited.
> Surprising nth order effects of city planning, the more car-centric your culture is, the less time the average person has for books
Perhaps this could be a selling point here in the UK. Yes your very late train has once again been cancelled and you now have to get a place on the replacement bus service, but at least you've had some time to read!
The stance I'd have is the less travel-centric your life is, the more time you have for reading (or anything else). Big tech making more remote work feasible has opened this up a lot more than city planning can.
In Japan, as elsewhere, bookstores in general are facing hard times [1, in Japanese], but the Kanda-Jimbochō area in central Tokyo has somehow managed to keep over a hundred shops in business. Most of the area was aggressively redeveloped when land prices shot up during the late 1980s and redevelopment has continued since, but the bookshops have held on. Some of the shops at street level are visible on Google Streetview [2]. More photos at [3].
I live in Yokohama and used to go to Kanda-Jimbochō regularly, but I haven’t been there since COVID. The photos make me nostalgic.
Interesting. Does anyone know of any comprehensive resource that can give a number for the US? I'd be very surprised if the situation were the same (although if it were it would be a nice pick-me-up), and I'd be interested in speculating on why the US and Britain might be different. Could it be directly blamed on the degree of penetration of Amazon or Amazon Prime?
At least as of a few years ago, physical bookstores were making a comeback in the United States.
Most attributed this to an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario. Amazon stomped Borders and Barnes & Noble into the ground, which meant that in many towns there was no longer a huge chain competitor in the bricks and mortar space. That opened up room for the small indy bookstores to come back.
Edit: this NPR piece claims that the number of indy bookstores in the United States increased 35% between 2009 and 2015.
I mean that’s not true? If buying new is crazy cheap and very convenient via Amazon(etc) doesn’t that necessarily undermine the size of the second hand market? It certainly has for me.
Amazon lists 2nd hand books, and if you pay for Prime, you can get free shipping, I believe. However, I recommend you take a look at Better World Books, thriftbooks, world of books, discover books, second sale; each of these will sometimes sell books, new or used, below the standard prices that Amazon sets and the other high-volume booksellers follow.
There's "crazy cheap" on Amazon, and there's "crazy cheap" second hand, but there's likely an order of magnitude between them.
Annecdotally here 2nd hand books cost around $2, for recent stuff, sometimes less than $1 for age or condition. New ones are $10 - $15.
So new and 2nd-hand are not really "competing" with each other, price wise.
Yes they compete, yes there are many other factors that affect the profitability of 2nd hand stores, but I don't think price-of-new is a major factor (in a decline sense.)
For starters, Americans are reading less and less (and I strongly suspect what they're most reading is utter trash [e.g. the political here-say/Trump fan fiction of the month]. The reason I bring those up is because they are terrible for second-hand because no one cares about Clinton's tell-all book after the first 6 months. These books end up first-hand in the bargain bin or at Costco after the initial hype.
I would be curious about Amazon thought, because there is certainly a thriving ecosystem of second-hand book stores listing their inventories there. USPS plays a huge part in making this possible through the Media Mail class of mail.
Many of the second-hand stores are also British, but you will find almost none of them are Canadian because Canada hates being competitive and as such, does not have a viable class of mail to ship books with, be it it domestically, or abroad.
You can especially see this at your local Goodwill (in the US) - all the hardcover books are of a certain "bestseller" type and many will be clearly never even opened.
Meanwhile actual second-hand bookstores often specialize in something (there was a really good one that specialized in science fiction) - they still have a normal selection of books like a small library, but most of the shelf space is whatever they specialize in.
FWIW, the only thing I've ever bought at Amazon's was an out-of-print book via their network of book shops from when AMZN started business by selling books and other media.
Isn't this just like other industries coming off a high (computer sales for example) due to the pandemic? Obviously book sales were up, they couldn't stay there forever.
Was just thinking about the economics of those "spirit of halloween" stores being a short term tenant of last resort for REITs and other property management firms, and if there were a way to do it for used and returned books, it could improve street life and sustain or raise the property value of the locations. Instead of promoting them as garbage outlets like discount book stores do, it could be somewhere welcoming.
The term for these is "pop up shops". Books sound like an intriguing idea as the cap ex may be low (some shelves, plus of course the stock). It would be a way to feel out the local market as well.
So if your shop kit was a stack of shelved books sorted in categories that you could do in a single warehouse, in modular tall shelves full of a category, which fit on dollies, can get shipped to the location and loaded through a standard sized door, maybe some shelf-top warm lighting, some basic furniture (that would also be for sale as floor models), an integrated pos and inventory system, it could be a thing. The only hitch is that the magic of bookshops is the staff, so you may need to source them from acting and theatre programs where people train and specialize at being interesting, so it wouldn't fly with basic cashiers, they would need to be booksellers. Customer and local market data collection might be one of the main sources of margin as well. Can do that easily with wifi and NFC tag recievers and other sensors as part of the external signage.
MY recently renewed commercial power contract attracts a Govt subsidy which puts it more or less the same as it was last year. This subsidy applies to all other businesses, including book shops.
Hay does have a lot of secondhand bookshops and their existence has elevated a small backwater of a town into a successful tourist destination. However, in recent years a lot of bookshops have closed - becoming antique/curio shops instead (source Wikipedia). I suspect that many of the tourists to "The Town of Books" don't buy enough books to sustain the local economy.
Not only Amazon, but the rise of ebooks in general. While there are still a lot of holdouts, I think every voracious reader in my family has switched at least some of their reading to ebooks. The ease of acquiring ebooks from the library through Overdrive/Libby means I treat the trip to the bookstore as an exploratory treat rather than an errand to buy the next book in the series
Amazon owns the most important aggregator of second-hand bookshops - AbeBooks. It actually helps me to support second-hand bookshops because I can search and buy from anywhere in the country. Sometimes after buying I develop a relationship and start talking to the shop directly.
BookFinder4U is even more useful, as it is a superset of Amazon, eBay, AbeBooks, and a few others. Coverage is not limited to North America. (http://www.bookfinder4u.com/)
viaLibri (https://www.vialibri.net/) includes ABEbooks and the other major US marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Biblio, Alibris) and international marketplaces. It's far more comprehensive than bookfinder4u, which doesn't do well for books published before ISBNs were introduced (~1970).
Thanks, this looks like a good alternative. One thing though is that people may find the presentation of results easier to search through in BookFinder4U. For pre-ISBN books, you need to use the Out-of-print Search. I use it regularly to find old, limited run, academic monographs.
(He's still alive and kicking. I bought a secondhand book from a random eBay seller the other year and it turned out to be him. Quite a shock.)
That aside: I find it hard to believe the assertion that "the number of second-hand bookshops in the UK had increased by about 25% over a thirty year period". All the areas with which I'm particularly familiar saw a notable decline in this period (some almost precipitous, such as Oxford or Uppingham). My gut feeling is that Driff's 80s guides were not as comprehensive as the poster believes, and that the advent of the internet has made it much easier to compile complete, crowdsourced directories such as thebookguide.info.