Three "flavors" explain the different ways people love books. | #104
I’m Charlie Becker, a second-generation bookseller building an AI tool for used bookstores out of my family’s store in Houston, Texas. This newsletter is a “weekly magazine” about stewardship: preservation through creation.
To celebrate the 100th issue of this newsletter, I asked readers to send in their questions, promising to write an individualized response to each.
I liked the resulting conversations too much to keep hidden, so I’ve taken some, anonymized and edited them for clarity and length, then expanded on the original, handwritten responses I sent. Here is the first:
Dear Charlie,
I love used bookstores. The smell. The serendipity. I love thinking about how thousands of people spent days, weeks, or even years writing their books, and that somehow, I ended up at that moment to discover them.
There has been a used bookstore for sale in my hometown for a while. I’d love to buy it and turn it into something great. The first thing I’d do is put the price of each book on the first page. Currently, they don’t price the books and seem to just ‘make it up’ at the checkout. It drives me nuts.
I know it’s probably a terrible business, but every time I pass by, I think about buying it. How profitable are used bookstores?
- M
Dear M,
To answer your question frankly, used bookstores are not that profitable. In my previous career, I helped people start small businesses, and I would always tell entrepreneurs that I think most businesses are on a spectrum with one end being (mission-driven) lifestyle business, and the other being a profit machine.
Starting a profit machine is when you have a hunch for a business and want to use it to generate as much profit as possible. Starting one of these usually means you’re pretty agnostic about what you actually end up doing. Starting or running a lifestyle business means that you want to create and propagate something in the world and make it self-sustaining.
Most used booksellers start lifestyle businesses because of how they feel about books. I believe you can conceptualize how people feel about books in three distinct flavors. (I say flavor because, like a flavor, it is a dominant but not exclusive presentation. Something can be mostly spicy but also sweet, or mostly salty but also bitter, etc.). The first flavor is book as artifact: the physical object of the book is special. The second flavor is book as experience: the act of reading matters, the book is sometimes almost incidental. The third flavor is book as commodity: books are simply a vehicle for data and/or a unit of commerce.
Most people who really love used bookstores are a mix of the first two when it comes to how they regard books. Someone who loves books as artifacts in the extreme is a collector who does not read. Somebody who loves books as experience in the extreme is a voracious reader who only uses an ereader (like a Kindle) and is not at all interested in the idea of physical books. I see a lot of the former and have met some of the latter in the wild, but rarely. (Anyone who believes books are strictly a commodity says things like, “I only read blogs,” but in a disdainful way, not a confessional or matter-of-fact way.)
Every once in a while, somebody will come into the store who thinks of books as a commodity, and they will be surprised everything isn’t priced $1, or that we are not super interested in competing with every single online marketplace on price. When they say something like, “this is cheaper on Amazon,” I usually just say something like, “sounds like a great deal.”
As to your experience with the pricing being made up on the spot, I get your frustration. However, we’re also sometimes guilty of having difficult to discern prices or seemingly making them up. A huge part of it is that we’ve had some of our inventory for 30+ years, so not just the price but how we determine price and where we write the price inside the book has changed. Without some kind of barcoding system, it would be very difficult to physically reprice our 250k+ books in-store every few years.
Our retail practices are a little different from most businesses. Churn doesn’t work the same way for a used bookstore as most businesses, because you don’t want inventory to necessarily fly off the shelves as soon as it comes in, nor do you want to regularly cull stuff that hasn’t sold, simply because that idiosyncratic mix is what people want. We might acquire a book for next to nothing and sell it for 100x that because the author died, or they option a movie, or some guy who wants it just decides to check out the store for the first time. This odd mix creates the serendipity you enjoy, but also creates some logistical problems like the phantom pricing.
There are currently a limited number of software products for used book inventory. This knowledge is part of the problem I’m trying to solve with the AI project, because it’s not only frustrating for buyers, but also creates a lot of problems for sellers. Thanks for your attention and for your support of small bookstores.
Best,
- Charlie Becker
I’m experimenting with calling everything after the main essay/story the Afterword, and breaking it down into subsections. Today, I open it up to everyone to send in messages, share the newest podcast issue, and share a comment I enjoyed from a past issue and an old essay issue it related to.
This issue stems from a response to a reader for my 100th issue. I wrote almost forty of them and will be including a bunch more of them after some light editing and polishing. I had so much fun writing that I’m making that back-and-forth a permanent feature.
If you want to send a question, recommend something I should read or watch, or respond to anything I’ve written that you’d rather not leave in the comments, fill out the form below. You can elect to receive a postcard if you want to, similar to the people who sent in the 100th issue messages.
PS—Apologies to Adam and Tatiana who I had “return to sender” issues with the original batch of postcards (please check your email from me). And BIG thank you to Wendy and Cherron for the mail they sent back to me! If you have not received your original 100th issue response, or if you sent me something back and I didn’t mention it here, please let me know.
Episode #2 of I Loved Reading This is live!
My first interview-focused episode of the podcast is out! Thank you to Alex Dobrenko` for talking to me about “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter (for two hours)! And thank you Alex for going on a ton of tangents with me too.
If you want to read the story before you listen to the podcast (you dont’ have to), here is a link to the pdf: The Jilting of Granny Weatherall. I will be cross-posting the episode to your inbox on Friday, or you can find it here.
Next week I will publish the episode I recorded with Michelle Varghese, where we read How Will the Miracle Happen Today? by Kevin Kelly and let that guide us down a bunch of fun digressions.
After my last essay, Lindsey Honari had a great comment, an excerpt from which I’ll share here:
What struck in the solar plexus was the realization that the environment we in Gen X grew up in was a moment of specific conditions, and not one of permanence. What we are mourning most in the age of screens and frictionless encounters is the ability to experience others in environments not our own.
“[E]xperienc[ing] others in environments not our own” is something I consider profoundly important. My current professional journey has me working solo pretty often, which drains me faster than when I work with a team. I’ve found that sometimes all I need to do to recharge is run an errand—even better if it’s somewhere unfamiliar. Two years ago, I wrote an essay tangential to this idea:
Please keep writing Charlie. It is always interesting and inspiring.
I'm a fan of this series!