Hand-Wringing Over Used Books While New-Book Industry Teeters Over the Brink

The New York Times's David Streitfeld recently beat his breast so hard, the thumping reverberated throughout the book publishing's trade journals and blogs. In an article called Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It, he expressed guilt feelings about buying used books.

...it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.

Since Amazon's used-book feature has been in place for years, and indeed six years ago Streitfeld himself wrote about it (Authors, Publishers Protest Amazon’s New Strategy for Selling Used Books), it's a little too late for Mea Culpas. But Streitfeld does raise some important issues when he asks, "...where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?"

The first thing we need to get clear is that money for used books has never gone to authors. There are some enlightened lands where royalties are paid to authors when their books are checked out of a library. Otherwise, authors are not exempted from the cruel fact that the secondary market for artistic product leaves the original creators out in the cold. Authors may take what comfort they can from knowing that someone out there thought enough of their books to buy them used. But unless they're saints, that comfort will be more than offset by the realization that their books were resold for as little as one penny, a fraction of what the bookseller, Amazon and UPS made on freight and handling charges.

Nor do publishers participate in the proceeds of used-book sales. Streitfeld's 2000 article acknowledged the bellows of anguish from publishers about being cut out of the loop.

Local community bookstores? They don't realize much by way of profit from used books, either. Major booksellers like Olsson's, Robin's, and Powell's have either gone out of business or are contemplating it. Wonder Book and Video, a major firm in the field, is fighting to stay competitive. And, though described as one of the great used-book stores in the country, New York City's Strand closed its Annex in the Financial District in September of 2008. Is anybody making money in used books? Think about this: a month before Strand shut its Annex, Amazon announced it had bought Abebooks, a major used-book purveyor.

As I say, it's a little late to lament the ceding of the used-book business to Amazon. The game is pretty much over. Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, beams with pride about the centralization of a process that, for all its serendipitous delights, was chaotic, labor- and real estate-intensive, and frequently just plain crazy. To hear him tell it, Amazon is rescuing a dying business and bringing service and professionalism to it, to say nothing of increasing literacy. Reading Bezos's defense of the practice - written six years ago - is a little like listening to Mephistopheles praising the virtues of immortality. But you have to pay the Devil his due, and I think we should.

Feeling sheepish about helping to fatten Amazon's bank account? Time to get over it. Big as the used-book issue is, we have far greater fish to fry, like how our poor dear broken old publishing industry is going to go on producing new books.

Richard Curtis