Powell's Bookstores Chicago

How long has Powell's been involved in selling remainders?

Powell's has been buying remainders for about 25 years, and selling them to other booksellers through our wholesale division since 1990.

Is this your specialty? If so, do you have other specialties besides this?

Buying and selling remainders and hurts is one of our specialties. As a reflection of our flagship retail store in the Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago, we originally focused our efforts in the remainder business on academic and scholarly titles, working primarily with University presses. Our retail stores have expanded their scope as has our wholesale division to include more general titles. Brad Jonas, the managing co-owner of Powell's is also a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), the most prestigious rare book organization in the country. In the rare book field, we concentrate on academic and scholarly books, especially in the fields of medieval and ancient studies and philosophy. We also specialize in books on books and art and photography. Perhaps the best way to describe what we do and specialize in is by simply saying that our efforts in remaindering and internet bookselling are a reflection of our brick and mortar (and limestone) stores: we carry quality used, rare, and out-of-print books in all fields, with our strongest holdings in scholarly subjects.

How long have you been involved with CIROBE and what is the nature of your involvement?

Powell's has been involved in CIROBE since before its formation. After buying and selling remainders to other bookstores, Brad realized that the remainder and overstock book trade needed a better market for its sellers and buyers, most specifically an annual trade show exclusively devoted to it. So in 1991, Brad and Marshall Smith, a commission sales representative for book wholesalers, brought to fruition CIROBE. Brad is the co-president, and Gene Paquette, who runs Powell's Books Wholesale, is the vice president of CIROBE. Furthermore, for the first ten years of CIROBE, the manager of Powell's Bookstore South was also the exhibits manager for CIROBE, although since both businesses have grown, those jobs have been separated for the last five years.

How has the internet changed your business?

The internet has changed the world of used bookselling all together. At first we started on the internet listing only our antiquarian and rare books. We saw the internet as an updated version of the older antiquarian bookselling staple of catalogues. Some of our people pushed to have our own web site (like our friends in Portland), but at that time we thought that Abebooks was setting up the right model and marketing to sell our books, especially since the internet sells one book at a time to one customer, so bringing the most books together on one site had much better results than getting one customer to our site. As the use of the internet grew and matured, with bookselling as an important part of its retail component, we further diversified our listing to include the remainders we had purchased over the past 25 years (we've got so many that we are still in the process of listing them all). Listing on Abebooks has mostly given us exposure to more customers, so we can sell and buy more books. We have always been strong in our specialty areas, and have bought great rare books and sizable quantities of hurts and remainders, but the sales were one at a time in our stores and the annual academic conferences we attend. But with Abebooks and the internet, we can sell them one at a time to a much larger audience than the foot traffic through our stores. We can thus buy the better books in larger quantity and sell them quicker, thus maintaining and expanding strong sections in our stores. One other significant aspect of listing books on the internet through Abebooks is that it allows us to sell quality books in subject areas which we do not have as strong of foot-traffic to support. Thus, the obscure academic international relations book finds its customer much easier than ever before.

What is your most memorable bookselling experience?

Brad actually has a great story about that which relates to remainders, which is in the Publisher's Weekly CIROBE Special Report:

Norman Blaustein, a great book collector who ran a reprint press (Tudor) and a remainder company (Landmark Books) took Brad around the New York ABAA Book Fair, one of the - if not the - most prestigious antiquarian bookfair in the US, early in Brad's career, pointing out all the books there that Norman had remaindered in previous years that had become rare, expensive books. This experience taught Brad one of the most important lessons of his career: that you should focus on the intrinsic quality of the books. Norman was a leading figure in the resurrection of lost books that had, for one reason or another, missed on the new book market, but had their own staying power in the used book market.

Do you have any advice for new booksellers?

Brad's story fits nicely here. Focusing on quality is always the first and foremost rule of Powell's Bookstore. One interesting thing about how the internet has changed the used book trade is in the availability and visibility of the market. Before the internet, you might have a rare book in Chicago that no one else has, but there was probably a copy in 25 other cities across the nation. Now customers are more informed about the other copies and the price range of the book and that is a great thing for the business. The first impulse in getting involved in internet bookselling is to price your copies a few dollars lower than the cheapest copy on Abebooks, but that tends to lead your store/listings to have no personality or staying power in the business, since after you sell your best books (many might go to other dealers), you're left with little solid inventory to offer. The standard answer you'll hear in this situation is to specialize, but that's only half-right in our opinion. We feel you should both specialize and diversify. Specifically, keep moving the line for the books that don't define who you are. Buy in good quantity to get the best deal and keep selling them through, but if they're the books that you truly believe in their intrinsic quality, you might want to raise the price on the last few so they can be part of your identity. Basically, you have to be cognizant of and receptive to the market, but you can't let it control your business and overrule your instincts.

How do you see the internet changing bookselling in the next few years? Do you feel this is a general reflection of bookselling overall?

The internet has already significantly changed bookselling for reasons I've mentioned above, although one of the larger trends we have noticed is a generational difference. I'm 27 years old and my first instinct is to go into bookstores to both look for specific titles and to browse, but people I know who entered college a few years behind me say they always go to the internet first. This trend isn't going away and no one has yet solved, in my opinion, browsing books on the internet, whether new, bargain, or rare. I think that the internet bookselling world has significantly matured in the last five years and is settling into its place in the larger world of bookselling. One thing that I am excited about is the return of catalogues as a way of expanding customers’ knowledge of titles. In the past, we issued a medieval studies catalogue and a classical studies catalogue, but the prohibitive costs for us with printing and mailing forced us to stop (especially since the catalogues are very big). Taking a cue from the great job done by Michael Hackenberg with PDF catalogues, we began posting our entire medieval and ancient catalogues both as Abebooks listings and on our web site as downloadable PDFs with updates and new arrivals on the 15th of every month. I feel this might be part of the future of internet bookselling, as book dealers try to turn non-browsers, back into browsers. Especially since in the early days of the internet one could browse with keywords, but now there are so many sellers and titles, that it's an overwhelming avalanche.

One more thing is that readers are being brought into the bargain book equation more and vice-versa. One of the criticisms of bargain books and the internet is that it's killing new book sales. Why buy new when you can find it used from anywhere in the world? Why not buy the discounted hardcover instead of the (increasingly expensive) new trade paperback? But we feel that these worlds are coming more and more together both online and in stores, and creating more readers who buy both new and bargain.

 

The views of the author, expressed above, are not necessarily those of the Advanced Book Exchange.