the used book wars
By Celeste Ng
An agent once told me that if I wanted to support my fellow writers, I should never buy used books, because the author gets no royalties on re-sold copies. And while that is certainly true, this editorial in the Guardian makes an eloquent argument for why secondhand bookshops are important:
[T]he best have stock that is old – an out-of-print Penguin on Imagist poets, or a Fontana reader bringing news (at least it would have been in 1981) from the sociological front – and temptingly affordable. They contain treasure, however dusty.
Several commenters point out that this editorial makes no mention of the huge impact that a large rise in online second-hand bookselling (often via a larger site like Amazon) has had on the industry. LSEScientist notes:
To write about second hand bookshops without any apparent awareness that publishers cannot sell as many new copies as they once did since people buy them internet second hand–and much cheaper–suggests the writer is writing in 2006 or 2007. In 2009 the story is that the second hand book selling internet has trashed the old rules and like newspapers does not have a new business plan.
Meanwhile, big-box and online retailers aren’t the only ones driving independent and used bookstores out of business. The charity Oxfam’s bookstore chain is getting blamed as well:
Harrison said that when Oxfam opened 18 months ago his income halved overnight. Two other shops moved out or closed. “I held on until now but just couldn’t keep going. Oxfam is the Tesco of the secondhand book world. It is destroying the industry. Half our business is rare old editions but in a recession people aren’t buying so many. So we pay our bills from the sale of £2 paperbacks or hardbacks for under £5, and Oxfam has destroyed that.”
But Oxfam fervently denies claims that it poses a threat to other second-hand booksellers.
Do you buy used books? Only in bookshops? Only online? Never? Why or why not? If the answer is yes, do you — especially if you’re an author or publishing professional — feel guilty doing so?
From my vantage point I only see a small portion of the book industry, and in that small portion there has been an incredible change in the last ten years. If I know in advance which book I want, and it’s available new in hardback, I usually buy it on Amazon, since it’s unlikely to be in a local bookstore and will also be less expensive there. I prefer to support the author, but I don’t expect my buying behavior to reverse the tide. The entry of large corporations into book distribution has more or less doomed the book industry to low margins. As a retired printer, I can tell you there’s no money in that either.
There have always been challenges to authors who want to get paid. D.H. Lawrence had a terrible time in England because of the obscenity laws. His typescript for Pansies was seized from a registered mail package on the way to his agent and destroyed because it contained the word “shits” in a quotation from Jonathan Swift. He first published Lady Chatterley’s Lover himself, making out well. It then became one of the most pirated novels in English in the 20th century. A pirate even offered to print a new edition for him! One lesson is that authors must be resourceful, and not just linguistically. Another lesson is to live for your art: Lawrence battled the literary establishment, prudish laws and pirates and won, notwithstanding Kate Millett’s more recent criticism.
As a student, I rely on used textbooks to make ends meet. Using Amazon and buying books from classmates (which is quite difficult to manage, even at a mid-size university, and risky as professors are constantly changing textbooks) I spent $191.17, including shipping, on all my books for the fall semester. Buying them new, from my college bookstore, would have cost $524.50. I saved over $300, just by using a different website.
I know the textbook market is broken, but many of the books I need are actually paperbacks, novels for survey classes that are probably gathering dust in many used bookstores. The problem is, I also don’t have the kind of time on my hands to dig through the paperback bins at every Goodwill in the city. Amazon collects and collates and organizes alphabetically every book I need by price. If a service is better it’s going to be utilized.