Antiquarian Book Market Has Evolved For Life On The Web
Sam Missingham, co-founder of Future Book, agrees, “Amazon’s second hand market has revolutionised the way people buy second hand books. There’s almost no book I can’t buy now if I want a copy — 10 years ago I people could have taken a year scouting through second hand shops and still not have found what I want. Now one five-second search on Amazon and you can have it delivered to your door.”
However, this marketplace brought with it opportunity and also threats — according to Julian Wilson, Books Specialist at Christie’s in London, “There’s never been a better time for people to buy such a wide range of rare books at low prices. A culture of price under cutting is causing prices to fall dramatically in the low to mid end market. For instance, 17th-century county maps of England are selling at about 30-40 percent of their value 20 years ago.”
Read it all Wired UK
Guest posted by Barbara Morgenroth
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This is very true, in terms of being able to find something. I remembered a book I read as a child – I have a copy of the book now – but what I loved was the cover. A little bit of time searching on Amazon, and what do you know – I can get a copy of that book, with that cover!
Amazing! That would have been near impossible prior to on-line selling – how many used book stores would I have to visit to find the same thing.
Accessibilty is amazingly increased. I can’t speak to price, though.
I guess I’m one of the few who can’t always find the book I want on Amazon: my tastes in reading have always been very far down the long tail. (My areas of interest include Early Medieval History & material on Ethiopia — neither of which are usually found in B&M bookstores, not even Powell’s — but I’ve found it hard to find even much more common books, like hardback English translations of Yasunari Kawabata’s books.) When I was actively buying books, I usually had to also look on AbeBooks & Alibris for the titles I wanted.
Amazon has made the effort of tracking down these titles much easier, but used books still come to the market at the speed they did before the Internet: in driblets & spurts, often without warning. Yes, scanning the websites makes book hunting faster than visiting stores or reading sales catalogs, but one needs to repeat the search on a regular basis — & hope other needs won’t block the chance to pick up a desirable buy!