AbeBooks Survey: Who Is Selling Books Today? Who's Buying?
- By Michael Stillman
AbeBooks surveyed almost 2,000 of their booksellers.
By Michael Stillman
Abebooks recent released the results of a survey they conducted of almost 2,000 of their booksellers. While their findings did not particularly surprise us, they did confirm a lot of our own anecdotal impressions about who is selling books today, and particularly, who is selling online. We then went to the source, AbeBooks, to see what their reaction was to the results.
Youth may be served, but youth is not doing the serving. Abe found that 79% of its sellers are aged 45 and over. This places the bookselling profession in the same category with Wal-Mart greeters and...well...book collectors. Perhaps the greatest issue facing the collectible book field today is the aging of those who have an interest in its wares. The current generation has not grown up with books the way earlier ones did. Alternative sources of information, first television, and now the all-invasive presence of the internet, has made books an afterthought to much of a generation. It is hard to sell nostalgia to those who never experienced the thrill when it was new.
This is not to predict the doom of bookselling. Millions of books are undoubtedly changing hands every few days, and many buyers are young. The huge textbook market must have an average customer age of around 20. The issue here relates to the traditional collectors, a valued but smaller part of Abe's overall business.
The remaining profile of Abe's booksellers is also interesting. Half have degrees or some type of "higher qualification," and most sellers left white-collar careers to become booksellers. The most common prior careers are teaching, librarians or other library careers, sales, and management. What we are seeing here is something most AbeBooks sellers know (likely from personal experience) -- those entering the field tend to be well-educated, professional people, looking to exit their stressful careers for something more relaxing. Boy are they surprised! For so many, bookselling is a labor of love, rather than a great career move (financially). They love books and want to be a part of the business, but for many it may be more suitable for a side, hobby career than a way to get rich.
The survey shows that 11% of Abe's sellers work 51-60 hours per week, 9% over 60 hours. These are not the hobby sellers but those trying to make a full-time income. The most time-consuming task is online cataloguing. You knew that. A majority -- 60% - sell only online, but just 21% plan to launch their own selling website. Abe sellers get their books at library sales, estate sales, private sales, and auctions, and 26% have traveled up to 100 miles to obtain a book. One quarter of these dealers expect to increase their online inventory by 10% to 25% this year.
In a sign that there are many booklovers within this profession, the survey revealed that 33% read from 5 to 10 books per month, despite all of the time needed to sell them.
What are the sellers' biggest fears? To this question, 68% listed falling book prices as their largest concern. Another 38% said they were worried that fewer young people are reading books today.
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AbeBooks Survey: Who Is Selling Books Today? Who's Buying?
- By Michael Stillman
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We went to Abebooks' PR and Publicity Manager Richard Davis for their thoughts on what the survey means, and in particular, their reactions to the booksellers' major concerns. Rather than just a standard reply, he was generous enough to provide a thorough response on behalf of AbeBooks, from which we quote at length, as it offers the insights of the largest "pre-owned" bookselling site in the world:
"The seller survey confirmed many of the facts that we already knew from 11 years of day-to-day communication with booksellers. We know the job involves long hours, we know that we are dealing with sellers mainly aged between 45 and 65 years old, and we know many of them have come from different careers to embrace bookselling. We made the results public because there is sometimes a perception among would-be sellers that online bookselling is easy - pick up a few old books at a yard sale, slap them on the internet and off you go. We wanted to show that the job requires hard work and professionalism.
"Overall, online used booksellers are very similar the world over - Americans, Canadians, and Britons are particularly alike. There were some key differences - for instance, the French say they work longer hours. In France and Germany, there are also a far lower percentage of female sellers than elsewhere.
"It was interesting to hear how far sellers go to source books although we know that sellers are never "off duty," even when they are on vacation. They find it very difficult to walk past a used bookshop even on the family holiday. It was interesting to see that the American booksellers are more highly educated than their British counterparts. It was interesting to see that significant numbers of sellers want to launch their own ecommerce websites - clearly some sellers are very tech-savvy now.
"It was good to hear that the American sellers appreciate the importance of overseas customers - internationalization has been a key strategy of AbeBooks.com for the past five years as a method of countering slowing ecommerce growth in North America.
"The survey was particularly useful for us in showing what the future might hold - sellers clearly see the need to put more books online in order to increase sales and differentiate their inventory from other sellers. We had wondered if the supply might start to slow down but it's not, so we think AbeBooks.com will be listing around 120 million books by the end of 2008. Clearly, sellers have large numbers of books in storage (hence concern about rising storage costs) but need time to catalog and upload these books onto marketplaces like AbeBooks.
"Falling prices are a result of the transparent nature of the internet and it has occurred in many sectors, not just used books. Clearly, our booksellers are ultra-aware of the competition between sellers on AbeBooks and the other marketplaces. It would be incorrect for AbeBooks to attempt to influence pricing - that's not our job. However, we'd like to point out that the internet has also pushed up prices for antiquarian and rare books because sellers are able to instantly confirm the market value of a particular edition.
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AbeBooks Survey: Who Is Selling Books Today? Who's Buying?
- By Michael Stillman
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"The fear about fewer young people reading is a concern shared by the AbeBooks.com organization. As a business, we require young people to be inspired by books and to read, and also to collect. The traditional AbeBooks customer is an older, professional person but we are keen to reach out to younger readers -- that's where the next generation of collectors will come from. We try to balance our marketing efforts between satisfying existing customers and attracting new ones, particularly younger ones. Of course, people reading less is a social issue when youngsters can now choose between computer games, the internet, television and books to fill their spare time. As you say, there are no easy answers - we just try to celebrate books and champion the people who sell them."
Richard Davis' impressions of the market are consistent with our own. The decline in prices of some (though certainly not all) books is clearly a supply and demand issue. Books for which there once appeared to be little supply have proven to be much more common than was thought after the internet made copies visible. Add to that the effect of the ‘net in drawing more old books out of the woodwork (or attic), and you have a supply/demand imbalance. This may eventually even out, but it will take time.
As for the issue of young people reading less, that is a fact of life. And, to the extent they do read, much of it may come from a computer screen connected to the internet. Book collecting is to a large extent a nostalgia enterprise, and this generation has fewer experiences with books over which to become nostalgic. However, everyone gets nostalgic for something from their youth as they move past childhood. Those memories may well be bound within the pages of books, even if these people were not heavy readers when they were young. Besides which, people like to collect "things," and recollections of YouTube videos are not the type of "things" you can place on a shelf or table.
We expect the different types of experiences of today's youth will lead to the development of different types of collections in the future. Perhaps we will see "multimedia" collections -- ones that include items like photographs, broadsides, signs, promotional objects, videos and recordings, and other ephemera together with books. These collections, rather than being a library of Mark Twain first editions, may include various items pertaining to something like rafting on the Mississippi (or perhaps on some more adventuresome rapids). They may more closely reflect the owner's personal experiences and memory than does a collection of old first editions. Books may be a part, rather than the entirety of this collection. This is not to diminish the collecting of old first editions. Some will always treasure firsts, just as there will always be people who listen to blues and folk and Dixieland music. It's just that a large portion of the next generation will likely have different tastes, based on different experiences, and booksellers who are able to recognize these new collector interests and best accommodate them are the ones most likely to succeed.
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