The BookThinker Newsletter ISSN 1547-9501 139, 2 November 2009

#139, Special Report 2, 14 December 2009

Special Announcements

Condition Guidelines Beware of the Grinch! There have been major, unannounced changes to half.com's condition guidelines, such that a careful bookseller's listings will now require special attention at half.com. If you describe all your books as "Excellent customer service, thousands of happy people," you've got nothing to worry about, but if you describe your books with greater care, you will need to be very cautious.

Top 10 on eBay October 2009 If you guessed The Lost Symbol was in the Fiction Top 10, you'd be right - 5 times. Dan Brown's latest novel took half the places on the list. He was joined by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ayn Rand, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, and Erle Stanley Gardner. The non-fiction list ranged from Ninja Submission to the 3-volume Handbook of Iron Meteorites. But most surprising was the appearance of two eBay store items. BookThink hasn't noticed store items on earlier lists, so it may have been more common than we think. Wouldn't you be surprised, though, if one of the books in your eBay store made the list?

#139, Special Report 1, 30 November 2009

Special Announcements

Basic Cataloguing Something challenging for you today. Bookseller Joseph Maraglino - some of you may know him as fine.books or "Joe" on the eBay bookseller's forum - has granted us permission to publish his guide to basic cataloguing. Though this has been in place in a slightly different form for some time on the above forum, I felt that it would be useful to expose it to a broader audience because, let's face it, few booksellers bother to catalog their books at all. Of course, one can argue that not all books need cataloguing, but I invite you to suspend this argument for the time being, read this guide closely, several times if necessary, and ponder its implications for your future in bookselling - especially in light of what's going on in the current marketplace.

#139, Update Announcements, 23 November 2009

Update Announcements

Bookselling in the 21st Century Part V: How to Liquidate Books Liquidating portions of your inventory doesn't need to be an act of desperation. It can be a necessary, rational response to the marketplace - and often profitable. In Part V of our series, Bookselling in the 21st Century, we offer strategies for getting this done.

From the Editor

J.M. Dent Books in Series Three New Checklists for Booksellers and Collectors I'm pleased to announce that Everyman's Library collector Terry Seymour has compiled three new checklists of J.M. Dent series books - Mediaeval Towns, Dent's Double (and Treble) Volumes and Children's Illustrated Classics. All are now available as a package from BookThink for $9.99. Click here to purchase, and read his introduction to the checklists in our first article.

Scanning with Apple's IPhone 3G Now It Works! Second in this issue is my review of a recently launched iPhone application that mimics a tool many of you depend heavily on - a laser scanner. Though not a laser scanner as such, RedLaser is the first iPhone app that accurately recognizes bar codes and delivers search results in under 10 seconds. At $1.99, what's not to like?

Recent BookThinker Issues

#138 Update, 26 October 2009       BookThink's Top 10 on eBay August 2009 Keeping up with what sells for the highest prices on eBay is always interesting. But in August, the winner in the Antiquarian & Collectible category had an unusual wow factor. Though book related, it wasn't a book at all. The rest of that list included Moby Dick wedged between 4 volumes of the 1853 American Flora ... and Helmut Newton's Sumo. If you read Hebrew, be sure to see #5 in the Antiquarian & Collectible list. In the Fiction Top 10, a US seller placed 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 10th with Stephen King titles. The non-fiction list ranged from Julia Child to Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama. #138, Special Report 2, 5 October 2009 Special Announcements       Bookselling in the 21st Century Part IV: Identifying Books That Need to Be Liquidated Immediately No doubt many of you have already lowered prices some in an attempt to ride out what we're now calling the Great Recession, and I believe that this is a necessary strategy for many of us. But I also believe that, as we work our way into the digital era, at least some print books have already or will soon become near impossible to sell to anybody for any amount. What this suggests to me is that, while lowering prices on one's books generally will boost sales in the near future, something more dramatic may need to happen to at least a portion of our inventories. There are some books that will need to be liquidated as soon as possible - and in almost all cases these fall under the umbrella of commodity books, those purchased for content, as opposed to antiquarian (or collected) books.

The BookThinker Newsletter
137 Special Report 1
7 September 2009

Special Announcements

Letters to the Editor From David Greif Response from Karin Bergsagel After publishing our interview with Alibris CEO Brian Elliott several weeks ago, bookseller David Greif wrote me a detailed response expressing his disagreement with a forum letter we had published along with the interview - written, you may recall, by BookThink's News Editor Karin Bergsagel. Since David's letter was primarily a response to Karin's thoughts, I asked Karin if she would respond to David's letter, and the result follows.

BookThink's Author Profiles An Interview with Lizzie Skurnick Also today, Media Editor Catherine Petruccione is back with an in-depth interview with author Lizzie Skurnick, whose recently published book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, is a celebration of authors she and other women loved in their formative years. I think you'll find this interview especially informative about what's actually going on with young readers today and why - and what impact this may have on the future of bookselling.