There has also been a growth in first-hand bookshops, especially specialists/curators (e.g. only selling sci-fi, only selling books by women, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the Waterstones and Blackwells of this world.
> only selling sci-fi
I distinctly recall getting a towel signed by Douglas Adams during one of his signings, I may have met Ellison there once.
Been a long time.
You lucky, lucky man, you hoopy frood.
Please tell me you aren’t gonna say you don’t know where you towel is?
There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.
Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.
Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.
> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.
Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
And I know they have to do this, everything donated has to be checked to ensure safety and cleanliness, it costs them money to keep the shop open and staffed. But if you can't actually save money by buying secondhand goods there then why would anyone shop there?! It's a 10 - 20 percent discount on goods that may be years old when Amazon rotates these discounts through new goods 24/7.
Or one of the Left Behind books.
NYC in the 1990’s used to have a few neighborhoods full of bookstores. My favorite was just around 16th street in between 6th and Broadway.
Jimbocho has limited English text.
Now Hong Kong, Quarry Bay Street has a few but they're all on south island I see and accessible via the metro.
Quite why this has occurred is a subject of occasional argument, but I've never heard a definitive theory on it, and it partly overlaps with the general decline motivated by ecommerce. They do compete on some level with existing businesses, as debated here, but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.
Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.
As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
Typically this starts as a grocery store, but sometimes it will be some other larger retailer that collapsed (see Bed, Bath and Beyond or now Jo-Ann Fabrics)
They either become a Goodwill or they become a gym.
It's interesting that they are almost never subdivided-- they'd rather have a single 2000 square metre shop, presumably paying a concession "better than leaving it empty" rent, than to modify the layout of the building to open it up as two or four smaller shops.
Do you guys not have pawn shops, smoke shops, and check cashing shops over there?
Not sure about UK, but in the USA, people have discovered that there's profit in mining thrift stores for quality products and reselling them. Usually online, but also in antique malls*. There are a quite a few apps that make it easy to look up something by picture and see what it's worth.
* not sure what Brits would call this - it's like brick and mortar ebay. Merchants rent out cubicles that they fill with random stuff, and customers check out at a common till when they are done.
There are some exceptions to this such as specialist charity bookshops which keep the stock locally, but do make sure to price match with the going rate online.
Few diamonds to be found in the rough nowadays.
Could anyone elaborate on this?
Aesthetically they are, at best, a sort of British twist on the cheapest Ikea stylings which can be OK in small quantities but when they become everything it is depressing.
Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable.
Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of books people don’t want), so they tend to have a large collection of random books of not as high quality. They’re run by volunteers - which generally means enthusiastic staff, but it does not mean knowledge about books.
Charity shops have sprung up all over on high streets, even while businesses around them fall. It’s not hard to imagine that the economics are different and that non-charity shops can’t compete due to lack of special tax treatment.
But charity bookshops have different motivations and appeal to different shoppers.
Essentially it’s only bad if you like reading good, hard to find books.
Or believe that others finding them when they might not particularly be looking for them is a common good.
Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.
Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
It's a common complaint that donations should not be used to pay salaries, but the important question should be how much leverage those paid staff can extract out your donation. Skilled people usually don't want to work for free, but they can magnify a donation by reaching more potential donors via advertising, more appealing shops, etc.
In unrelated news, access to a pure, unfiltered spring drives out local bottled-water sellers.
We are in an era where even manufacturing physical copies of books is incredibly cheap. I'm not going to stress about charity bookshops disrupting scarcity in that ecosystem any more than I'm going to worry about libraries or the Internet doing so.
We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/cheaper-books-b...
What Australians often do instead is get ebooks through other means. Libraries are also more attractive for cost reasons.
Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness gracious.
Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.
> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.
For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.
Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.
Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.
I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.
Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.
Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)
Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.
So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.
Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.
It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.
It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
Ugh.
I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:
- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.
This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)
I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
I wonder how this is offset by someone finding an item not worth enough to keep. But maybe I underestimate the generosity (or need for income) of the typical person visiting secondhand stores to offload their stuff.
This is an odd take, to me.
When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.
Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.
But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!
None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.
Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.
I often liked the notes people left.
They apparently have a website, and 2 other stores. I had no idea.
Certainly doesn't appear to be a business in decline.
And considering that being a bookshop in Sydney they compete with some absolute giants I am quite impressed tbh.
The reasoning it follows and suggested is quite dubious.
A bookshop is a business. Any business naturally has a loss function in the form of constraints, after which point it necessarily must go out of business and close. That loss function also determines how many people can be served by that bookstore insofar as the revenue earned goes to capital reserves and operations.
The second-hand bookstores have remained almost constant over decades, while population growth and the number of people being served has grown dramatically.
The charity bookshops involved have special tax status, they receive free stock, they get to choose which stock they receive goes to the paper mill or gets resold, and they can continue as long as their charity can continue.
While they must keep accounting records, those records need not be public, and may involve donations that may further subsidize destructive behaviors without the public's knowledge. They need not make a profit, whereas all other non-charity bookstores must make sufficient profit.
No business that has natural constraints can compete with an unconstrained entity in the same market. The money printer without constraint will always win, suborn, and drive out other businesses that do not have the same constraints.
It is just a matter of time and economic circumstance, and by the time anyone notices its too late.
There is also the possibility that many of the secondhand shops may also be propped up through loans, despite the ever tightening dynamic of ponzi that must be paid back (as it works for all debt in general).
There is great harm that state propped apparatus can do to business and the market in general, as well as to society. Rather than being open about it, these things have been happening in the shadows and that's something that needs to be revisited. If there is not a comparable loss constraint, the accounting records should be public to safeguard cultural history, and hold to account malefactors.
When the state wants objectionable material out of the general population's hands it just silently removes it from a pipeline they created, having learned from history, more specifically Hitler that burning books in public isn't a good thing.
Goodwill follows this practice of removing objectionable material from its pipeline in the US, and library budgets in many places are dictated by how often the book is circulated. Low circulated classics that are objectionable according to some undisclosed person, may just disappear once the library donates the low circulation books to the charity, that then removes that content without fanfare before it ever hits a shelf.
Ever wonder why many books from the 80s or earlier are often quite uncommon? Yes they are old, but the circulation was massive for a lot of these, and what's available now doesn't account for the natural difference of time, especially considering many of the books received from libraries were rebound to library bindings.
Food for thought.