Priscilla Juvelis Rare Books
Specializing in 20th Century
Book Arts & American Women Writers
Bauman Rare Books
Landmark Books In All Fields
Passion Rewarded. History Preserved
Online Sales Boom
$600 Million and
Growing
Used books made headlines
in September when the Book Industry
Study Group (BISG) released a report on the secondhand book market.
Remarkably, all the major online sellers, including Amazon.com, Abebooks,
Alibris, and eBay, agreed to disclose their sales. According to Boris Wertz,
the chief operating officer at Abebooks, who chaired the study, the “enormous
interest…about the size of the used book market” spurred the
competitors to release transaction data, so long as the published report
kept confidential the sales figures for individual companies. The results?
Six hundred million dollars in online used book sales in 2004, a number
based on hard data from the biggest players in the industry, with careful
efforts to eliminate double counting (a sale on Amazon of an Alibris book,
for example). The study estimated overall U.S. used book sales at $2.2 billion.
Susan Siegal, a publisher of regional guides
to bookstores and a study participant, observed that the results combine
general used books and used textbooks. “It’s two different
worlds,” she said. Removing textbooks produces a markedly
different result—traditional used book sales reached only $600 million
according to BISG, with $350 million sold online. The study relied on survey
data to calculate off-line, in-person sales. Wertz
wrote in a follow-up e-mail, “I would agree that this seems rather
low,” probably because “we are working with rough estimates
here and not with hard transactional data.” (By design, the study did
not include the antiquarian market.) Nevertheless, Wertz concludes,
“It’s the best study done to date.”
The New York Times reported that some study participants believe
that the size of the online market and its rate of growth—a staggering
38 percent last year—tolled the end of the traditional used bookstore.
Siegal pointed out that the BISG study doesn’t indicate that most
online sales actually originate in open shops. “Booksellers,” she
said, “have
more options for selling than ever before.” Stores sell to both walk-in
customers and over the Internet. She conceded, however, that the number of
open shops has been declining. “It’s not a dying
industry—it’s a changing industry. You have to be a businessperson now,
not just a book lover.”