Rare Book Monthly
Bookselling Relationships: Partnerships or Parasitism?
Booksellers and mega-sites on which they list can use some relationship rescue.
Payments are not wire-transferred immediately; instead they are delayed so that the sites can take advantage of the very substantial "float". And the accounting can be so complex and so difficult to use that even tracking sales becomes unpleasant.
Their partnership with inventory utilities suggests they will additionally want control over more aspects of our business and I will not be at all surprised if they don't attempt to get into the postage printing and package insurance business as well. I recently participated in a dealer survey on one site to see if I was interested in having them do postage printing and package insurance (I'm not).
Nor do I need or require any service to upload my listings, thanks anyway. It takes just seconds to do those uploads and I am totally disinterested in offering a mega-inventory "partner" yet another piece of each transaction.
At the same time, these sites have made no attempt to improve selling conditions in their environments. They have done nothing to eliminate the drop-shippers, the empty listers who own no books, the re-listers, who use other people's listings, the ignorant, not even booksellers who can't SPELL, or who write nonexistent, poor, or just plain lying descriptions of their wares. They have not gotten rid of the computer programmers who do not own books, but are real good at creating bogus listings with those irritating repetitive descriptions (I especially like the ones that say books may have a remainder mark).
They do not eliminate those with whom it is near-impossible to communicate (real names and addresses and emails and telephone numbers missing or obfuscated). They do nothing to eliminate sellers who throw their books without protection into bags -- good luck to you if you get your purchase in one piece. They do nothing to eliminate all the trash $1.00 and $.01 listings.
We booksellers who care about what we sell and care about our customers have to do business in what is becoming a bookselling garbage dump, while at the same time, at just about every turn, being bled by new vertical integration ideas, like forcing us to "buy" services which we do not want or need.
Am I being just a sloppy sentimentalist to suggest that a "partnership" is not a one-way street characterized by the abuse of one party by the other because they have a near-monopoly position?
