Out of twenty-five or thirty storefront used-bookstores which I have dealt with at one time or another in the last forty years or so, I think only three dealt in new books at all, and at least two of these of these involved special circumstances. One was a feminist bookstore across the street from the University of Pennsylvania, with general used books in the attic, and a limited range of textbooks on the main floor, the class orders being obtained by the proprietress’s personal connections with U. Penn professors. Students who went to the university bookstore for most of their textbooks had to go to the feminist bookstore for the books for the one course taught by a feminist professor.

The other store was a “new age” bookstore– new spiritualism, and used general paperbacks, and a proprietor who was personally involved in “new age.” In the latter case, the bookstore was the only bookstore of any kind within miles, except for a college textbook store, and it picked up some general traffic: people who did not themselves read books, but want to give books as gifts to children, etc. There was also a group of moms bringing their kids in to get a book on something to write a middle-school term paper from, but the bookseller was usually unable to help them, as he couldn’t afford to compete with a school library. This was just when the internet was getting going. One time, I led the proprietor back into his shelves, picked out a particular book, handed it to him, and said: “here is a book which you can sell for ten dollars, tomorrow morning, on the internet.” The store eventually went out of business, largely because its space was wanted for the expansion of a sports bar.

You would probably have gone broke trying to manage a collection of used books to the detail required to deal advantageously with a publisher, ie. claiming return privileges, trade credit, etc. The procedures for new books and used books were simply so different, and so were the customers, come to that. Then, too, the real-estate requirements were so very different. Used bookstores were never located in malls, because the rent was too high. I have known a used bookstore to be located in an obsolete supermarket, and another one to be a third/fourth floor walk-up. The latter, the Smith Family Bookstore of Eugene, Oregon, was accounted to be an unusually good used bookstore.

Of course, there are other possibilities. When I lived in West Philadelphia, in the early 1990’s, the area had substantially fewer used bookstores than it could have supported, and the excess market expressed itself in garage/porch/sidewalk sales. Of a Saturday morning, I would go out for a walk, chance upon a porch sale in progress, browse the books, and get something at a (very low) realistic price. People chose to sell their surplus books on their doorsteps, rather than haul them a mile or two to donate them at the public library.

I don’t see why the same principle should not apply to outlets for music or movies. Attempts by famous rock stars, etc. to boycott used outlets are futile. I have just bought a consignment of 350 moves on DVD’s for about a hundred dollars, in sets of twenty-five and fifty movies per package, from Edward R. Hamilton. That would be perhaps ten percent of list price for the sets, and a still lower figure for the individual movies, say, about one percent. The trend in the size of the sets is upwards, and that of the per-movie price, downwards. By an inadvertence inherent in aggressive collecting, I bought two copies of one set, and I propose to leave the surplus copy in the apartment complex laundry room, which functions as a local “put-and-take” box. As I see it, the used/remainder movie market is functioning with admirable efficiency, and brutal competition. The DVD backlist market seems to rely more on remaindering, and less on used, compared to the book backlist market, but the end result is much the same.

It is only a matter of time before the music publishers “see the light,” and put, say, a couple of hundred hours of music on a DVD, substantially sans pictures. There were so many artists whose complete published “ouvre” never amounted to more than ten hours. Compared to a streaming service, one of the implications of a DVD is that it is irrevocable, and “first sale.” Sooner or later, it winds up in the used market, and prices have to be adjusted downward to compete with it.