Shops in Ramsgate and Broadstairs other stuff in Margate

The good news is

 This closed shop

 In King Street Ramsgate

Has developed this sign.

I think we are likely to find more small shops containing cafes. King Street in Ramsgate seems to be a fairly good place for business to get started. We do reasonably well here in the bookshop I put this partly down to the good public transport connections. The Loop bus to and from the station and other Thanet towns stops close by and it is right by Staffordshire St Car Park.

Here in the bookshop I am building up to working on the history section, this doesn't include books about the history of the county of Kent or the Isle of Thanet which is something I understand fairly well.  The training I received to become a "Charter Bookseller" back in the 1970s isn't a lot of help either.

Apart from reading fiction for leisure, my main interests are, Thanet local history, art, science, philosophy and psychology, with, world history and geography my interests are fairly narrow and mostly related to thinking and perception in man and machine. 

Maintaining the good sections in a bookshop is mostly about dealing with books that haven't sold, the idea is to look up each book as though I want to buy it online, Amazon, Ebay (including the sold listings) perhaps Abe. Then to either make sure the copy we have in the bookshop is cheaper, write the book off altogether and put it into the sale at 50p or if it looks up at over a tenner list it on Amazon.

I recently did this to the craft section and have been out buying craft books to replace the ones I have got rid of.

 The troubles are multiple though, the main one is that buying secondhand books online has turned into navigating through a something of a minefield, e.g. book £3 but when you click on it the postage is £8, e.g. is it the lovely edition produced by Oxford University Press, good quality paper sewed to the spine and bound in strong woven bookcloth, or is it the book club edition on cheap paper sheets stuck to the spine and bound in paper impressed to look like cloth? Has the seller listed a book that they haven't got cheaply so that when someone else lists one at around the same price they can buy it?

Having a logical system is not enough.

 Having a logical system is not enough, you have to have a person to override the system.

Here is the link to the pictures of the books we put out today

I think another aspect is talking to our customers and hopefully finding out about the books they would like us to stock.

The internet has changed which books sell and goes on doing so in different and unexpected ways.