Tuesday 3 June 2008

Reflections from the book trade

As life gets more expensive in general it is strange that secondhand book prices are falling and have been for a number of years, up to three years ago the average price of a second hand paperback novel had been stable at about £3 for some time, this has now fallen to about £2.50 and hardback non fiction’s average price has fallen from about £9 to about £7.

You have to appreciate that prices reflect supply and demand, and the difference between what we pay for books and what we price them at remains the same. In terms of business our turnover is up, it is supply that is increasing.

I am also only talking about good quality ordinary books, the others either go in the sale section, hardbacks 10p and paperbacks 5p and then of for recycling, or have a collectable value, by which I mean that they are more expensive than one would expect in the same way that a penny black stamp costs more than a penny.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.