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A Tale of Three Book Stores
Jan. 12th, 2010 10:09 pmBlack Oak, one of our beloved Berkeley used book stores, closed late last year. That would have left Berkeley with three* fewer used book stores than when I moved here twenty years ago (with the other casualties being Berkeley Book Consortium**, up toward the Gourmet Ghetto, and the Half-Price Books on Telegraph), but in a rare turnaround, the store reopened under new management down on San Pablo, almost directly west of our house, in December.
I'd been meaning to make it there since the holidays, and finally decided to head out there this evening, as part of a quest for the books of E.C. Tubb***.
The new management is internet-savvy, as I understand it, and that clearly shows in the ways that they're stocking and pricing books. They now have a much larger selection of hardcovers than they used to, and many fewer paperbacks. That's not exactly my preference, because hardcovers mean extra storage space, but I expect it allows for better margins when you're dealing with the razor-thin profits allowed for by the extreme competition that the internet supplies.
Even more notable, however, is the fact that the new Black Oak is the only physical used-book store that I've ever seen that has priced books rationally in this new internet age. I talked several weeks ago about Moe's, and how much it annoyed me that they were now lowballing used book prices. That was partially because they were doing it incompetently (not understanding what Amazon zShop prices really mean, because they don't include S&H), partially because they were doing it inconsistently, and partially because after lowballing prices they were still trying to sell everything for about 60% of cover.
Black Oak instead has books priced rationally when compared to the internet. Their paperbacks generally seemed to still be half off (to a minimum of $2.50), and that makes sense because you just can't get used paperbacks cheap via the internet, since at large supplier Amazon, there's a $4/book S&H charge.
Hoewver, their hardcovers and trade paperbacks were often quite a bit cheaper, and by my thumbnail estimates, their cheaper prices correlated to the prices I could find online. I picked up a copy of Time Masters, an ancient DC miniseries that I've wanted to get for years, since I have 5 or 6 issues of the original 8-issue comic, but something that I never cared about enough to pay much for it. Cost: $4. If I'd bought it online I would have paid $2 + $4 S&H. Black Oak couldn't have done a much better job of splitting the difference of the price and ensuring that they'd have a product that moved rather than one that set around.
As far as I can tell, they weren't doing the converse, and high-balling prices based on what they saw on the internet--though I'm less convinced that'll stay the case as they sell things through Abebooks.
Black Oak was actually the third of three of Berkeley book stores that I went to over the last couple of days, and they were a study in contrasts.
The first was Other Change of Hobbit, and my how the mighty have fallen. Their Shattuck Avenue store has always seemed small and cramped, but never as much so as it does now. It also has quite a bit of odor of cats, no doubt because they keep three in the small space (one of which spent much of the time I was there hissing at other customers). There's just random crap stacked all over, including a step latter here and random piles of detritus there. It's just not an attractive space.
(To be fair, you could say the same of many of these elements of my house, but then I'm not trying to present it as a clean and well-lit place for books.)
I had actually stopped shopping much at Other Change years ago, mainly because of their poor hours, but also because the ambiance of the shop on Shattuck never equaled what it used to have up near Telegraph and that's just gotten worse.
I think that I've also been driven away from Other Change because of their increasingly mercenary attitude toward "collectible" books. I remember in the day when that used to mean $5 each, rather than a typical used price of $2 or $2.50. Which was a bit steep, but OK if it was something I really wanted. Yesterday it meant $12 each for a large selection of post-Doctor Who "New Adventures" that I've considering starting to collect.
I hate to speak ill of any used book store in our area, but yesterday's visit to Other Change didn't do anything to change my views from the last few years. I hope that they can turn it around, and don't accept what they currently have as a good model for retailing.
The last book store I visited was Dark Carnival. They're not a used book store, per se, but they do seem to frequently pick up and sell new copies of long out-of-print books. When I used to visit there more frequently, they'd have large selections of the yellow-spined DAW books. This time I saw some of the Ruth Thompson Oz books (which I was hunting for 10 or 15 years ago, and which I know Dark Carnival did not have at the time) and, ironically, a large selection of the post-Doctor Who "New Adventure" books.
Funny story, Dark Carnival had about half of their New Adventure books marked down to $4 and the other half still selling at cover price of $6. That sure tells me a lot about how each store treats its buyers and its own quest for profit****.
I also find it ironic that I could offer up some of the same arguments against Dark Carnival as I could Other Change. It's certainly cramped, for example, and there are certainly piles of stuff all around. The difference is, I think, that the piles of stuff at Dark Carnival are inevitably books, inevitably placed alongside the shelves of books of the same types, and always clean and well-organized. Everything just feels more well-kept, like the owners were actually maintaining their stock and their facility (and indeed someone was doing exactly that when I stopped by).
So that was my couple of days in used book retailing--and a tale of three stores.
* Or 2-4 less, depending on how you count it. I think "Cartesian Books", or something like that, is gone too, but since I only ever went in once, I can't shed too many tears for it. Contrariwise, the Pegasus Books in downtown didn't exist when I moved to Berkeley.
** Ah, something is truly dead when you can barely even find references to it on the internet. According to my Google search, this will only be the 4th reference to the store on the internet, and the only one giving any details. Berkeley Book Consortium was a used book store in (near) north Berkeley on Virginia near Shattuck that went out of business somewhere between 1992-1995. I was bitter for years, as they'd been driven out-of-business by rapacious landlords who jacked up their rent so high that they couldn't stay. On the other hand, I smiled everytime I passed it by for at least five years afterward, because it took that long for said rapacious landlords to get someone new into the space. Meaning for many years that they lost far, far more than they made by jacking the rent.
*** Another funny store: at all three stores, I only found a single E.C. Tubb book and it was at Other Change of Hobbit, the one store that I'm least likely to return to frequently for purely aesthetic reasons. But from them I picked up Kalin, book #4 of the Dumarest of Terra series, in my favorite edition--the Arrow Book edition which has the number right on the spine. It was $3, which is surely a markup for a used book published in 1976, but just at the edge of what bugs me. I get very annoyed at the nearby "Half" Price Books, which marks up almost every used SF/F paperback to $4, but as I already said, not at Black Oaks which used $2.50 as its minimum price (and certainly not at Moe's who still has their minimum price as $1).
**** The jury is still out as to who is pricing them right. I skimmed at Amazon today and I found some of the ones I remember looking at, all priced in the $4-6 range. Or, $8-10 with shipping. I don't know what that makes the appropriate local-book-store price, though if you use the one book I picked up form Black Oak as a model, it'd be $6-8, which sounds more like Dark Carnival's price than Other Change of Hobbit's, though it comes close to splitting the difference.
I'd been meaning to make it there since the holidays, and finally decided to head out there this evening, as part of a quest for the books of E.C. Tubb***.
The new management is internet-savvy, as I understand it, and that clearly shows in the ways that they're stocking and pricing books. They now have a much larger selection of hardcovers than they used to, and many fewer paperbacks. That's not exactly my preference, because hardcovers mean extra storage space, but I expect it allows for better margins when you're dealing with the razor-thin profits allowed for by the extreme competition that the internet supplies.
Even more notable, however, is the fact that the new Black Oak is the only physical used-book store that I've ever seen that has priced books rationally in this new internet age. I talked several weeks ago about Moe's, and how much it annoyed me that they were now lowballing used book prices. That was partially because they were doing it incompetently (not understanding what Amazon zShop prices really mean, because they don't include S&H), partially because they were doing it inconsistently, and partially because after lowballing prices they were still trying to sell everything for about 60% of cover.
Black Oak instead has books priced rationally when compared to the internet. Their paperbacks generally seemed to still be half off (to a minimum of $2.50), and that makes sense because you just can't get used paperbacks cheap via the internet, since at large supplier Amazon, there's a $4/book S&H charge.
Hoewver, their hardcovers and trade paperbacks were often quite a bit cheaper, and by my thumbnail estimates, their cheaper prices correlated to the prices I could find online. I picked up a copy of Time Masters, an ancient DC miniseries that I've wanted to get for years, since I have 5 or 6 issues of the original 8-issue comic, but something that I never cared about enough to pay much for it. Cost: $4. If I'd bought it online I would have paid $2 + $4 S&H. Black Oak couldn't have done a much better job of splitting the difference of the price and ensuring that they'd have a product that moved rather than one that set around.
As far as I can tell, they weren't doing the converse, and high-balling prices based on what they saw on the internet--though I'm less convinced that'll stay the case as they sell things through Abebooks.
Black Oak was actually the third of three of Berkeley book stores that I went to over the last couple of days, and they were a study in contrasts.
The first was Other Change of Hobbit, and my how the mighty have fallen. Their Shattuck Avenue store has always seemed small and cramped, but never as much so as it does now. It also has quite a bit of odor of cats, no doubt because they keep three in the small space (one of which spent much of the time I was there hissing at other customers). There's just random crap stacked all over, including a step latter here and random piles of detritus there. It's just not an attractive space.
(To be fair, you could say the same of many of these elements of my house, but then I'm not trying to present it as a clean and well-lit place for books.)
I had actually stopped shopping much at Other Change years ago, mainly because of their poor hours, but also because the ambiance of the shop on Shattuck never equaled what it used to have up near Telegraph and that's just gotten worse.
I think that I've also been driven away from Other Change because of their increasingly mercenary attitude toward "collectible" books. I remember in the day when that used to mean $5 each, rather than a typical used price of $2 or $2.50. Which was a bit steep, but OK if it was something I really wanted. Yesterday it meant $12 each for a large selection of post-Doctor Who "New Adventures" that I've considering starting to collect.
I hate to speak ill of any used book store in our area, but yesterday's visit to Other Change didn't do anything to change my views from the last few years. I hope that they can turn it around, and don't accept what they currently have as a good model for retailing.
The last book store I visited was Dark Carnival. They're not a used book store, per se, but they do seem to frequently pick up and sell new copies of long out-of-print books. When I used to visit there more frequently, they'd have large selections of the yellow-spined DAW books. This time I saw some of the Ruth Thompson Oz books (which I was hunting for 10 or 15 years ago, and which I know Dark Carnival did not have at the time) and, ironically, a large selection of the post-Doctor Who "New Adventure" books.
Funny story, Dark Carnival had about half of their New Adventure books marked down to $4 and the other half still selling at cover price of $6. That sure tells me a lot about how each store treats its buyers and its own quest for profit****.
I also find it ironic that I could offer up some of the same arguments against Dark Carnival as I could Other Change. It's certainly cramped, for example, and there are certainly piles of stuff all around. The difference is, I think, that the piles of stuff at Dark Carnival are inevitably books, inevitably placed alongside the shelves of books of the same types, and always clean and well-organized. Everything just feels more well-kept, like the owners were actually maintaining their stock and their facility (and indeed someone was doing exactly that when I stopped by).
So that was my couple of days in used book retailing--and a tale of three stores.
* Or 2-4 less, depending on how you count it. I think "Cartesian Books", or something like that, is gone too, but since I only ever went in once, I can't shed too many tears for it. Contrariwise, the Pegasus Books in downtown didn't exist when I moved to Berkeley.
** Ah, something is truly dead when you can barely even find references to it on the internet. According to my Google search, this will only be the 4th reference to the store on the internet, and the only one giving any details. Berkeley Book Consortium was a used book store in (near) north Berkeley on Virginia near Shattuck that went out of business somewhere between 1992-1995. I was bitter for years, as they'd been driven out-of-business by rapacious landlords who jacked up their rent so high that they couldn't stay. On the other hand, I smiled everytime I passed it by for at least five years afterward, because it took that long for said rapacious landlords to get someone new into the space. Meaning for many years that they lost far, far more than they made by jacking the rent.
*** Another funny store: at all three stores, I only found a single E.C. Tubb book and it was at Other Change of Hobbit, the one store that I'm least likely to return to frequently for purely aesthetic reasons. But from them I picked up Kalin, book #4 of the Dumarest of Terra series, in my favorite edition--the Arrow Book edition which has the number right on the spine. It was $3, which is surely a markup for a used book published in 1976, but just at the edge of what bugs me. I get very annoyed at the nearby "Half" Price Books, which marks up almost every used SF/F paperback to $4, but as I already said, not at Black Oaks which used $2.50 as its minimum price (and certainly not at Moe's who still has their minimum price as $1).
**** The jury is still out as to who is pricing them right. I skimmed at Amazon today and I found some of the ones I remember looking at, all priced in the $4-6 range. Or, $8-10 with shipping. I don't know what that makes the appropriate local-book-store price, though if you use the one book I picked up form Black Oak as a model, it'd be $6-8, which sounds more like Dark Carnival's price than Other Change of Hobbit's, though it comes close to splitting the difference.