6 Reasons Why Selling Books Online is Harder in 2009

I've been selling books online through my business, Gail's Books, since 1996. There have been dramatic shifts in the online book selling market over the last decade. It is much, much harder to make a living selling books now, for a wide range of reasons. In this article I thought I would share some of my opinions, in no particular order. I have never had what is called a "B&M", that is, a "brick and mortar" shop, so all of my experiences are focused on being an online only (mail-order only) bookseller.

Dramatic Increase in Full-Time Booksellers Selling On the Internet
When I started selling in 1996 the internet was just becoming popular so the number of booksellers selling on the internet was relatively small. That meant that your online book inventory had a much higher change of being purchased quickly and for decent money. Book buyers were delighted to discover that they could find their long lost book treasures online and didn't mind paying high prices for books their local booksellers couldn't provide. Many full-time booksellers with brick & mortar shops were too busy selling in their shops to want to learn this new technology and left the field to the techy types like myself who didn't mind learning how to create and catalog computer databases and upload to strange things called "newsgroups" and "book search engines" like Bibliofind and Interloc. But then the word got out that "you can make real money on the internet selling your books" and "your customers aren't coming into your store any more because they are buying online" and now it is rare that you find a brick & mortar open book store that doesn't list at least part of his book store inventory online.

Dramatic Addition of Part-Time and Hobby-Style Booksellers Selling On the Internet
As the internet became more popular and accessible to the general public it was inevitable that more and more people would want to get into the book-selling market. After all, it couldn't be that hard, right? You list the book, collect your money, and ship off the book. People from a wide range of backgrounds, from stay-at-home Moms, to retired professors, to disabled veterans discovered that they could turn those extra books lying around into real cash by selling online. And sites like eBay, Half.Com and Amazon sprung up that slowly redesigned themselves so that "just about anyone" could list books on their sites fairly quickly. As with the increase in professional booksellers selling online, the addition of the general public selling online caused a dramatic shift to lower prices for books, as books became more and more common online and the demand could not keep up with supply. Part-Time and Hobby-Style booksellers often don't have the same overhead as full-time booksellers or the interest of holding onto inventory for what is called "the long haul", so they will often offer their book inventory at much lower prices, which further adds to the downward spiral of prices.

Mega-Listers and Penny Sellers with Pricing Software Enter the Scene
Probably one of the greatest killers of the online book-selling market, in my personal opinion, is the mega-lister who uses automatic pricing software to make sure he is "always lowest" on such popular book-selling sites as Amazon. You get two or more megas selling the same book and using the same kind of pricing software and you can watch a book valued (once upon a time) at $30 drop to $25, then $19.95, then $10, then $5, until the mega is giving it away for a whopping penny. Because the mega-lister sells hundreds, if not thousands, of books a day, he gets a postage discount and actually makes money selling his penny book because of the money he saves on postage. Now what, average, small time, independent bookseller can compete with that?

The Cheap Supply of Books Is Drying Up
When I started this business, I could regularly go to a yard sale or estate sale or thrift store or (best yet!) a Friends of the Library sale and pick up large quantities of quality books for 10 cents and 25 cents a piece. Those days are gone. As the general public becomes more aware of the value of books (and yet unaware of the overall drop in online prices for reasons I've already stated) less and less quality books are being offered at these cheap venues, or if they are, they are offered at highly inflated prices. Many thrift stores or charities now cherry-pick their books and list them online themselves. The few books that appear to have any value are price-checked online and listed at comparable prices. Even businesses that ought to know better, like estate sales companies or antique malls, will blindly price any book older than 1970 at $3-$15 because it is "vintage." The golden days of the cheap supply of books, is gone, my friends, and is probably not likely to come back.

Dramatic Increase in Fees at the Bookselling Sites
Since I've started selling online I have seen a gradual, but dramatic increases in the costs of selling books online. I sell through my own personal website, Abebooks (a Canadian company), Amazon, Alibris, and Biblio. At every single site (except my own) I have seen the increase in monthly fees (based on the number of books listed) far beyond what inflation warrants. The sites have also increased their "commission" fees, that is the percentage of what they are paid per sale. The cost for accepting credit cards through these sites went up and/or you were no longer able to accept credit cards directly because of "fraud" and "credit card regulation" concerns. All the sites I list on (except my own and Biblio) now take a percentage of what the customer pays for shipping so it is not at all uncommon to lose money on postage.

The Death of the Book
I'm no expert in this area, but I'll just pass on my observations: young people don't seem to read nearly as much or consistently as their parents and grandparents. Playing computer games and watching videos and television seem to be the main forms of entertainment for the young. Parents don't appear to be fostering literacy in the home, so children aren't being read to very often. Public libraries are turning into multi-media centers, while the size of their book collections continues go down to pay for the demand for DVDs, CDs, and computer labs. Paper books are being replaced by electronic ones or being available to be printed on demand from electronic copies. What may end up killing online book-selling as we know it today is not the dramatic increase in competition, or the mega-lister, or the loss of cheap inventory, or even the increase in fees at the book-selling sites: it may be simply that the paper book died of natural causes and nobody bothered to resurrect it.

Blessings!