Canada's second-hand book dealers learn to adapt, profit in cyberspace

B7

THE CANADIAN PRESS

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EDMONTON - The World Wide Web has found a home amid the shelves and stacks of Canada's second-hand bookstores.

But sellers say that doesn't mean the final chapter has been written for customers who like to troll nooks and crannies in search of lexical treasures.

"Most of our sales are just good old walk-in traffic -- the old-fashioned way," says Pat Edgar-Brown.

Edgar-Brown is the manager of Old Strathcona Books in south Edmonton and is one of the sellers around the world who have had to re-learn their business over the last decade because of the explosion of second-hand book sales on the Internet.

Quantifying book sales in the ephemeral world of second-hand stores -- where shops come and go and books are sold and re-sold, counted and double-counted -- can be a mug's game, says author Susan Siegel, also a second-hand book industry researcher.

But Siegel says there is no denying the web has fundamentally changed the business model.

"The ones who have stayed in business have adapted and figured out what's best for them," she says.

The watershed, according to her industry survey, came in 2002 when the total number of used-book sales over the Internet crept over half to 52 per cent, while 31 per cent were sold in "bricks and mortar" stores. The balance went through mail orders and book fairs.

In the United States, she says, her surveys indicated 90 per cent of actual shops -- as opposed to stores that bought and sold only through the Internet or by appointment -- were into online selling and were accounting for the majority of sales.

"I think dealers have a wide range of options that they didn't have before."

Siegel says the main advantage of bookstores is that they retain a reader's ability to browse. In cyberspace you can't wander the stacks, eyeball the titles, pull out a rare gem, glance over the index and chapter headings and check to make sure the spine is in good shape and the glue hasn't stiffened and cracked.

"For really true book lovers," says Siegel, "there's nothing that can replace the experience of just wandering through a used bookstore."