Wall Street Journal features online booksellers

Today's Wall Street Journal carries a feature on online booksellers, including yours truly:

It helps to love books, but it's essential to know them. Market knowledge is especially vital for used-book vendors, who must glance at a title at a book sale and instantly decide whether they can sell it for a profit. With millions of titles in print and many millions more out-of-print books in existence, that's a challenge. Some second-hand booksellers rely on technology, scanning barcodes into handheld computers that look up likely market values from a database.

Entrepreneurs such as Mr. Wine and Mr. Weber prefer the old-fashioned way, relying on their well-developed sense of the market to decide whether to buy or pass, and how to price the books they offer for sale. "I like having to rely on knowledge and experience," Mr. Wine says. "And I like it that there are always going to be books out there that you've never seen or heard of."

Like Mr. Laties, Mr. Weber has distilled his bookselling experience into a self-published book, "The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site." He expects the book to generate about $60,000 in revenue based on its sales since he first published it last October. That's got him thinking about writing more books, but no matter how he does as an author, Mr. Weber says he's not likely to quit selling books. "I figure I'm always going to do it," he says, "because it's fun."

One clarification: The story notes that I sell used books through this Web site, but as readers here know, I sell my wares on Amazon and eBay.
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