Thinking back I think must of first got my hands on a
computer in about 1969 and over the years I have used them, mostly reluctantly
to do this and that and I suppose if you are reading this and comment on
Blogger, Facebook or some sort of social media site you know in a way it’s a
hit like saying. “Hello how are you?”
By this I mean, you don’t necessarily want the person you say it to tell
you all about their piles, or that thy have just contracted something that was
one fatal and now an uncertainty in the ever changing world of medical science.
So what do you mean? Probably something like dogs sniffing around a lamppost,
something along the lines of, “I’m alive and notice you are too.”
Sorry I digress, back in the day 1998 this would be, I
thought the internet would be the easy way to put books online and sell them, I
was of course wrong. To being with I decided to try the online bookselling
databases, what happened with this was the books you wanted to sell, with me
and the books in my bookshop this was the ones that had been on the shelf for
too long in the bookshop. To expand on this if you look at the books that went
out on the shelves in my bookshop today by clicking on this link http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/priest-sow-corner-in-bookshop.html
you will see that for instance the BBC Handbook for 1960 may be a bit of an
acquired taste and when I go back to the radio and TV section in the bookshop
in a year’s time it may still be on the shelf, so I will then want to move it
on by selling it on the internet and gat a different book for my walk-in
customers. To begin with this all worked very well with the online databases
only taking about 5% of the selling price of the book. Well now all of the
online secondhand book databases have either been gobbled up by Amazon or some
other huge multinational company and seem to wind up taking about a quarter of
the selling price. Anyone who has tried selling a collection of books on the
internet will know that it is difficult time consuming and the money raised
isn’t very much.
The biggest snag from the customers point of view with
buying a secondhand book on the internet is that you can’t browse it properly,
look at all the pages checking for signs of banana bookmarks, see if it smells
badly of damp, but most of look through the pages reading bits and deciding if
it really is the book for you.
After some though I have diced the best solution here is to
photograph all of the books on the shelves regularly and put the photos n the
internet in some sort of organised way, so that you dear reader can look at the
spines and decide whether it’s worth wandering down to the bookshop. Will this
work? I don’t know really, we put the Bygone Kent Magazines up earlier this
week see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/bygonekent/
and now we have started on the paperback fiction, see http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/fictiona/
and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/fictionb/
and http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/fictionc/
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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.