Have amateurs and the Internet ruined used bookselling?

Booksellers can be a pessimistic lot. Change can be upsetting, and bookselling is seeing more change more quickly than any time since the invention of movable type.

Is all lost? Maybe, maybe not, says Canadian bookseller Patrick Hempelmann:

The traditional concept of the used bookstore is basically dead: to wait for people to look for books that are out of print and hard to find, and therefore be able to charge a high price because of the rarity of what you are selling, that idea has been destroyed by ABE and by the Internet. There are very few books that are hard to find now.

What still works is to sell good books, remainders, review copies, used and hurt books and sell them cheaper, much much cheaper, than you'd pay at Indigo or Chapters. In the U.S., the used book business is growing faster than the new.