Old-Book Stores Are Preserved as Readers Peruse the Internet
More than an hour before the Book Baron opens for business, a dozen workers weave around its aisles, restocking shelves that are unusually tidy for a used-book store. Come opening time, however, not a single person enters the store, which anchors a barren strip mall in a modest Anaheim neighborhood that long ago fell from Barnes & Noble’s target demographic.
The dearth of customers doesn’t bother Bob Weinstein, who 20 years ago opened what is now one of the largest used-book stores in Southern California. Weinstein, who comes from a family of bookstore owners, has come to terms with the book superstores, whose cushy chairs and lattes, low prices and huge selections have usurped much of his walk-in traffic over the last few years.
Besides, Weinstein has the Internet, and that has made all the difference.
The Internet was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin of independent bookstores, finishing the job started by the superstores. Instead, it is turning out to be a boon for merchants like Weinstein who deal in rare, used and out-of-print books.
Online giants Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com and other Web booksellers have become the largest clients of Weinstein and thousands of other out-of-print book retailers across the country. The big online sellers rely on networks of used-book dealers to fulfill requests from customers who don’t care that the book they want is long gone from any bestseller list.
The majority of out-of-print books will be sold over the Internet within a few years because they are so hard to find, said Martin Manley, president and chief executive of Alibris, an online network of hard-to-find book dealers (https://www.alibris.com).
“This market is populated by mom-and-pop participants who are either doing extremely well because of the Internet or are going to be run over by it,” Manley said.
The symbiotic relationship between online bookstores and used-book sellers illustrates that even as giants dominate a market with their name recognition and marketing muscle, gaps remain for small businesses to prosper in the Internet economy.
Weinstein, who has been selling online for two years, plans to grow his Internet operations to be larger than his real-world ones.
“Our walk-in traffic has decreased, but our Internet traffic has increased substantially,” said Weinstein, who, with his wife, Lois, also owns Book Baron stores in Long Beach and Fullerton. Half of the privately held chain’s sales now come from the Internet.
And instead of opening a fourth store, Weinstein is boosting his fleet of a dozen computers, all of them hooked up with a high-speed connection to the Internet, and has launched an online auction site similar to EBay called BidBack.
Daryl Uecker, owner of Bookmart in Fountain Valley, may take a similar route, closing his store altogether and simply selling directly to shoppers on the Internet through his Web site, https://www.bookdetective.com.
“As far as e-commerce goes, books are a natural,” Uecker said. “In the used-books business, a person coming into the store looking for a book and not finding it will buy two or three others. Now they’re going online and we’re losing that walk-in trade.
“A general used-books store--if they’re not online--will be out of business in a year,” Uecker said.
While the numbers of independent bookstores--those that are not part of major regional or national chains--are not kept, the declining membership roll of the American Booksellers Assn. alludes to the industry’s ails. Membership that peaked at 5,200 in 1990 now sits at 4,066.
Last year, used-book stores sold 13 million fewer books than they did five years ago, a 30% drop in business, according to the ABA.
Much of that downturn has come at the hands of discount mass merchandisers such as Wal-Mart and the book superstores such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. In 1998, independent new-book stores sold 28% fewer books than in 1993, while large chain bookstores and discount stores saw their volumes rise 14% and 40%, respectively, according to the ABA.
Some book lovers see the Internet as a net gain for reading.
“Hollywood Boulevard used to be one of the great treasure troves for cheap used books,” said UCLA English department Chairman Thomas Wortham, who also went on a buying spree when the 1980s rejuvenation of Old Town Pasadena led to skyrocketing real estate prices that forced used bookstores to liquidate.
Though he laments the loss of the serendipitous “thrill of discovering a rarity or opening a book and finding an original etching of a prominent 20th century artist,” as he did recently, Wortham also believes that the Internet is serving a purpose for used-book lovers.
Before, he would search the printed catalogs of used-book stores for titles by a relatively obscure author, only to be frustrated.
“It was never worth their while for them to put these titles in their catalog, but yet you go online and all of a sudden you find four or five copies,” said Wortham, who regularly scours Internet book databases for new listings of old books.
The prices for out-of-print books are not necessarily better online than anywhere else, but sometimes nothing but the precise book will do.
Daniel Robinette had been looking for a specific printing of Agatha Christie books to complete a matching set of 73 that had been issued by Bantam Books more than a decade ago.
“It was a very specific title and a very specific edition that I wanted, and the only way to get it done was through the Internet,” said Robinette, a Gaithersburg, Md., resident who, after a fruitless search of bookstores in his area, bought the five blue leatherette-bound books from stores in Washington, New York and California, including Bookmart in Fountain Valley.
For the exact books that he wanted, and without the hassle of tramping from one bookstore to another, Robinette was more than willing to pay a small premium and wait for the shipping.
Online stores have long boasted of being able to carry millions of titles. In fact, however, many more books in circulation are out of print compared with the ones readily available, and most of those titles have never seen the inside of an online company’s warehouse.
“To say you’re going to be the premier online book destination, you can’t do that and not have a comprehensive out-of-print selection,” said Benjamin Boyd, a spokesman for Barnesandnoble.com.
To fill that void, online bookstores have partnered with networks of used-book dealers around the country. Barnesandnoble.com last year teamed up with Advanced Book Exchange, which has more than 5,000 member book dealers, while Amazon.com earlier this year acquired Exchange.com, owners of Bibliofind, a rare-book e-commerce Web site that acts as an exchange for several thousand small book dealers around the country.
When a customer asks an online bookstore such as Amazon.com for a book that’s no longer in print, the merchant will go to the network to buy the book from the likes of Book Baron, which itself may have a Web site. The online store then resells the book to its customer, usually with a mark-up. In many cases, profit margins for Amazon.com and other Web merchants are better on the hard-to-find books than with bestsellers, which they discount, industry analysts said.
For example, Amazon.com recently offered to sell “Narratives of Shipwrecks and Disasters, 1586- 1860” for $39.99. On Bibliofind, which is a subsidiary of Amazon, the 1974 book by Keith Huntress is available for $29.
All of the major book-dealer networks sell through the Web as well, meaning that the same book that is sold on their sites generally is sold at a higher price on Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. Neither Amazon nor Barnesandnoble.com will say how much they mark up used books or what percentage of their sales are from out-of-print books.
When Weinstein sells a book online, he prices them at $15 or higher, even if they sell for less in the store, because of the additional costs involved in posting things online. He charges additional fees for shipping and handling.
The shelves in his Anaheim store are stacked seven high with books ranging from a biography of Edgar Allen Poe by his onetime fiance Sarah Helen Whitman, to dozens of paperback copies of the Webelos Scout handbook.
Weinstein’s stores trace their roots to “an old junk shop” that his father, Irving Weinstein, owned in Gary, Ind., and passed on to his eight children when he died in 1962.
After attending their father’s funeral, three of the Weinstein brothers moved the junk shop to Compton. In the course of expanding their inventory, they found themselves with tens of thousands of books and opening another store, in Hollywood.
Now, six of the eight Weinstein children, a nephew and a niece all own bookstores, a total of 11 in two states.
“My entire family, none of us are highly educated like you’d think a bookseller would be, especially a rare-books seller,” Weinstein said. “But our children are,” said the graduate of East Meadow High School in Long Island, N.Y., whose son, Steve, practices law in Dallas.
Weinstein, 57, got into the business in 1966, opening Universal Books in Hollywood with his brother Jerry. Seven months later, Bob Weinstein’s wife became pregnant. Because the bookstore was not yet making money, Bob, a former Air Force radar technician, took a job as an engineer with Datacraft Inc. in Gardena to help support his family.
But the lure of having his own business proved too strong, and Weinstein opened a bookstore in Long Beach in 1974.
Son Steve pestered him for years to get onto the Internet, but the final push came nearly two years ago as customers began persistently asking for books that Weinstein would find on the Internet.
“It only made sense for us to sell our books that way, too,” Weinstein said. “My son had been trying to get me into it for years. A couple of years ago, we decided he was right.”
Times staff writer Jonathan Gaw can be reached at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.
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Changing Fortunes
Used-book stores have seen sales fall by a third as the big chains take an increasingly larger piece of the pie. Number of books sold, in millions
Source: American Booksellers Assn.
