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.

"We pushed $450,000 a year in gross sales in 1997-98," owner Mark Nemmers said. "The net was about $70,000 or $80,000, and we were growing at about 5 percent a year."

But Borders opened in Davis in 1998, "and we immediately experienced a 25 percent drop in business. The second hammer blow was the Internet catching on in Davis, and people becoming comfortable buying books online."

Another big blow, according to Nemmers: Kids don't read anymore.

Does competition help or hurt sellers of used books?

If you ran the only used bookstore in town, how would you feel if another one opened for business this summer? That's exactly what's happening in Omaha, Nebraska. According to this article, the bookstore owners both believe that having two used bookstores in town will generate more than double the sales volume of the original store. In other words, both of them will supposedly benefit from the competition.

Unlike what often happens when stores selling new books move into a market — as when Barnes & Noble and Borders entered the Omaha market and essentially crushed a variety of bookstores — used-book stores can help one another, Siegel said.

"The more there are, the better it is, because more book people coming through an area will say, 'Gee, it pays to stop,'" even if they're coming from out of town, she said.

I'm not saying this is impossible, but I'd predict one thing: If each store doesn't have strong walk-in traffic and a brisk trade over the Internet, at least one store will be out of business within three years.

One bookseller quoted in the story says:

A lot of people have closed their doors in this business and done the Internet. I really enjoy meeting people and talking to them about books or whatever. . . . Theoretically we'd do better if we closed our door and just put everything online. And we'd spend our days answering e-mails and shipping books.

That's not how I want to spend my life.

Eeking out a profit at brick-and-mortar bookstores

Here's a good follow-up to the recent post about opening brick-and-mortar bookstores. The San Francisco Chronicle points to Oakland's Diesel bookstore as an example of "what it takes to make a small bookstore succeed in today's era of chain megastores."

Independent bookstores have been squeezed over the past 15 years by a combination of this new competition and rising rents. The number of independent booksellers nationwide has fallen from about 4,000 in 1990 to less than 2,000 today.

Local casualties have included large, prominent stores such as A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, the Telegraph Avenue location of Cody's Books in Berkeley, and Kepler's in Menlo Park, which closed in 2005 but reopened with help from its customers.

Diesel, meanwhile, managed to generate profit of $138,000 on sales of $1.8 million last year, a margin of 7.5 percent.

In the bookselling world -- where the average independent bookstore had a net loss of 1.15 percent in 2005 -- that is considered wildly successful.

Clearing $138,000 a year is "wildly successful"? And that's the entire take -- the bookstore owners don't draw a salary.