The Diary of a Bookseller

THURSDAY, 23 OCTOBER

Online orders: 6

Books found: 4

One of the missing orders this morning is called Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema. Bethan had listed it in the theology section.

I spent much of the day checking the prices of our antiquarian stock to make sure we were the cheapest online. In most cases, when we originally listed the books on Monsoon, we made sure that we undercut the competition, unless the only other copies were ex-library or in poor condition. If we sell our stock online at a fixed price, we make sure that we are the cheapest available. Only the cheapest copy will sell. Often we are undercut shortly afterwards, but unless we go back into the system and check, we have no way of knowing this, and if our copy is not the cheapest it will never sell. Most of our antiquarian stock has now been undercut, not just by other antiquarian copies but by Print on Demand copies. When a book is out of copyright, anyone is permitted to reprint it.

Until relatively recently this involved scanning or retyping the book and having a few hundred (or a few thousand) copies run off. This involved a cost, and also a financial risk, so most antiquarian books that were reprinted were local history books which the reprinters knew they could sell in their locale. In the first few years of this century, though, technology emerged by which anyone with a POD printer could print off single copies of out-of-print books at a relatively low cost. The consequence of this is that a search for a rare book on AbeBooks and many other web sites will throw up numerous cheap copies of books that do not exist until a customer orders them. It has driven the values of what were once rare books right down, as the seller is now competing in a market-place that is flooded with reprints, and we now rely on customers who want the original book for its own sake, rather than just for the information it contains. Couple this with the Google Books project, which plans to digitise and make free copies available of the 130 million or so unique titles that it has estimated exist in the history of publishing, and you have a lethal cocktail for those few of us left in the secondhand book trade.

Till total £852.50

9 customers