Another big seller bites the dust in California
There's a going-out-of-business sale at Bogey's Books in Davis, California. The shop has an inventory of 30,000 volumes, mostly used.Gee, this is starting to sound familiar: Brick-and-mortar bookseller goes broke and blames the Internet and the chains.
Another big blow, according to Nemmers: Kids don't read anymore.
Labels: bookstores
posted by Steve Weber at 11/13/2007
4 Comments:
Doesn't Borders sell new books only as well as other non-book items? If Bogey's is a used bookstore then how can competition with Borders be a factor? It isn't. Second, Bogey's used book prices are way too high. Often 85-90% of MSRP. Finally, the internet expands immeasureably additional sales that could not be gotten locally in Davis. Surely if Bogeys had some sort of inventory record keeping system with ISBNs then listing in bulk to Amazon, et al would easily jump their sales above 5%. Dear Friends at Bogeys, send me your books and I will gladly sell them for you, make gobs of money and send you a weekly check less my percentage and expenses, all the while guaranteeing profits for you. You are sitting on a gold mine and don't even realize it. Shortsighted and unwilling/unable to take advantage of new and open opportunities galore.
I have a lot of empathy for Bogey's. I am in the same boat. I have 300,000 books. I saw what was coming in 1996 and went on line using interlock, that latter became alibris.I added 8 new employees and started to put books on line.When I sold a book We could not find it because we put it back on the open shelves. We learned our lesson. Today our infrustructure is as good as it gets. We must be rolling in money I wish! We are just barely breaking even. I have no rent and no mortgage. My employees get paid about 10.00 per hour.My incoming books cost almost nothing because all of the competition is gone and everyone that has books for sale has no other place to go. I was just offered 1,000,000 books for free if we would move them.I said call Amazom they already had and Amazon was not interested. I could go on forever but not now. I think anonymous is really amazon. What is the msrp on a used book. I just don't like spending a dollar to take in 50 cents.
I DON'T SEE HOW KATHY CAN TURN DOWN 1,000,000 BOOKS UNLESS THEY ARE REALLY TRASH. EVEN SELLING THEM FOR $1.00/PER SHE COULD PROBABLY RETIRE. I PROBABLY NEED MORE INFO ON THAT DEAL, BUT ON THE SURFACE IT LOOKS LIKE A WINNER TO ME. SPORTSWRITER
Sportswriter: If you can't see how Kathy can turn down 1 million books I'd encourage you to look at the economics of taking them on yourself. I'm nowhere near on Kathy's scale, but I've turned down offers of 1,000 books before without thinking about it. First of all, if you're selling on Amazon, a lot of books won't sell for $1, they'll sell for $0.01. So, your $1m "profit" has dropped to maybe $100,000 (if we're optimistic). Now, the last time I looked into it a semi could usually hold maybe 50k books tops, if they're packed safely. So you're talking a LOT of truck loads to move the books. You have to figure there's going to be labor involved to move them, to unpack them into some kind of warehouse space, to list them, etc. Then there's the rent and utilities for the warehouse space you're using, and the extra employees to handle the extra volume... How fast do you think that $100k in "profits" would dry up with all of those expenses? And what do you do with the 500,000 books that won't sell at any price. If it were as simply as saying "I'll take them" and not having to move them, list them, store them, pack them, or ship them it'd be a great deal, but it never is.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home