Rare Book Monthly
AbeBooks Survey: Who Is Selling Books Today? Who's Buying?
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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.
