I was cleaning up around the house and I found an old advertising pamphlet. It was for used book stores in the Rochester, NY area. It was dated 2011 and it listed seventeen used book stores.
I checked online. Only eight of these stores are still in business. A loss of over half in a single decade.
As many as that? I am surprised.
If you had a collection of restaurant menus of similiar vintage, how many of them would still be in business?
Restaurants are a more volatile type of business, even in good economic times; the closure rate, for new restaurants in particular, is quite high: it’s estimated that 60% fail within the first year, and 80% fail within the first five years.
I’d be curious how many of the defunct used bookstores in the OP’s area closed prior to COVID, versus the past year having been what finally did them in.
Almost no used books stores survive in Monmouth County, NJ. I think we have 1 left.
They are not a good margin business and taxes/rents are really high around here.
In fact the one left is in our lowest tax town. I hope they survived the pandemic.
I’m actually quite surprised the number is that high in this day and age.
Used book stores were always in a weird place. I used to talk with the owners of the one I frequented low these many decades ago when I was in high school - my father and I were big buyers (well, I was big for personal use and my father bought boxes for the free/lending library at the hotel he ran for a while) and they explained, just as @What_Exit mentioned, that the profits were really small. They had a pretty big place in one of the most run down areas of town and they still made most of their actual cash off of the new TT-RPG and Gaming stuff they sold. Since it was family owned, their costs were pretty low, and they (which was rare at the time) quite a bit of collectible books that they resold via mail.
But (this is key) both publishers and authors HATED them. They tried to get a few local authors to do a book signing and got utterly snubbed. From the POV of authors and publishers, every time a used book sells it takes money out of their pockets. Neither gets a single cent, so they both went out of their way (okay, not all, but many) to make sure their feelings were known to both readers and politicians.
And that leaves out the issue of people dropping off approximately a thousand copies of the latest read-it-and-toss it paperback bestseller that ends up being dead weight, or people demanding to sell to the used bookstore their dad’s heirloom copy of ABCXYZ and having to tell them it’s worth a buck fifty at most, or a small leak taking out 4 shelves of inventory or . . . . anyway, lots of cool stories. According to my dad, they’re still around, but down to one location instead of 3. I always visit when I come down, even if I do the majority of reading on my Kindle.
For an article on the subject …
Which includes some of the ranting, but also a rather famous author saying he’d rather they read his stories and enjoy them rather than worry about making all the money. 
I just remembered: I bought a used service manual for a nearly 40 year old car off Ebay just last week. Triumph of The Used Book!
I collect rare books. I’ve found a few treasures in used bookstores, but not that many. It always seemed to me that used bookstores existed to sell last year’s paperback Stephen King bestseller to a new owner. And that’s not so bad, if all you’re looking for is an engaging read on a flight, or something you wanted to read when it came out, but didn’t get around to it.
But like I said, I collect rare books, and I deal with a bookseller who deals in rare books. She is very knowledgable, and has a staff of buyers, authenticaters, and appraisers behind her. I can trust anything she recommends, whether it’s a rare first edition, or an autographed or inscribed first edition, or a special edition with limited copies. And her business thrives.
The used bookstore on Main Street may be suffering, but it seems that the used book business, as a whole, is not. It just seems that it has shifted more towards rare used books, than it has towards used paperback editions of Stephen King, Danielle Steele, and Clive Cussler.
I like old bookstores and want them to last, but they are an anachronism. The truth is, a strange rare book is easier to find online. What bookstores offer, or any shop, is the ‘buy it immediately’ experience, which is not what they’re set up for.
Perhaps, but can you be sure that it is authentic? You yourself need to do a little homework as to what was published when, and in what format. Although I’ve bought books from her over the phone (always on approval), I know that my bookseller has had her staff authenticate them.
When I can visit her (her office is in the US and I’m in Canada), she and I will set up an appointment. I can physically inspect the books she has for me–the bindings, the dust cover, the wear, the foxing; and see how her description and the book’s alleged condition aligns with what is in front of me. Most often, I will set up a second appointment, to think about what I’ve been shown, and to finalize a deal on my selection. And she knows that I know my books, so she would never try to pull a fast one, trying to push a first edition that obviously isn’t.
One does not get that kind of service online.
Problem being, 99.99%* of people don’t want that service.
*yes, this is one of the 68.3% of all statistics made up on the spot
For general second-hand books, Amazon or eBay have what I need - and I can get e-books cheaply from Amazon and Kobo etc too.
I like bookshops but I have pretty eclectic tastes and Queenslanders as a broad generalisation aren’t big on reading in my experience, so none of the second-hand bookshops tend to have anything I’m looking for.
I hope y’all don’t mind the hijack, but it seems to me that it’s not just used book stores that are gone. There are far fewer new book stores too.
When I grew up in the 20th century, every mall had some sort of book store, usually an independent, sometimes a chain. (Remember Brentano’s?) Nowadays, Barnes & Noble is the only one left, and I have to drive a while to get there. (And many of them are in their own building, making it difficult to use as a hangout while my wife shops, like in the old days).
Summary: The problem has nothing to do with used books; the problem is that fewer people are reading books.
As I understand it, running a used bookshop has always been more of a hobby than a business. You hope that the sales will defray a large chunk of the costs, and thus make it a relatively inexpensive hobby. If you’re very, very lucky, you might even bring in more than your expenses, and thus have a profitable hobby. But even a profitable hobby isn’t something you can live on, and the needle has been steadily moving redward for the industry, to the point that what used to be a profitable hobby for some is becoming an affordable hobby, and what used to be an affordable hobby is becoming an unaffordable one.
I’m not sure we have ever lived in a time where books were so available and so undervalued. This is reflected in reduced demand and low prices. It is sad because the market is consolidated. It is glorious since you can acquire the library of your dreams inexpensively. I believe that books in general will become more valuable in the future and not less so.
Five hundred years ago, books were priceless possessions and the mark of great status. And they were mostly about boring things - religion, politics and science. Few promised to entertain you or even improve your golf game. Scoff.
A digital book is great for travel and is convenient. Most of the books I read have not been digitized, and I remain neutral about digital books. If the market isn’t there for the paper copy, what will digitization add? I like textbooks on subjects I know little about and penultimate editions on alibris can be amazingly economical.
There are eight in the Rochester area?
When I checked using the internet I found far fewer than that. Where are they hiding?
You want depressing – Boston/Cambridge used to be filled with used book stores (and new book stores, for that matter). aside from a couple of places specializing in really old and arty books (including the legendary Brattle, which still sells lots of old paperbacks) they’re all gone. Even among new bookstores, aside from college bookstores, I think there are only two or three left (the Barnes and Noble at Prudential and Trident Booksellers on Newbury St. And there’s on at Jamaica Pond). Every now and then a new used bookstore opens up, but then fizzles out. (The Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore that used to be on Newbury Street, happy to say, has re-opened – in Lee, New Hampshire. run by the same guy, but 70 miles away rom where it was)
That’s the way I see it. The amount of book stores is an indicator of the amount of books being read.
I see buying used books as a gateway into getting people to buy and read books in general (this was certainly the case for me).
The bookstores they listed in Rochester were Bookends, Greenwood Books, and Rick’s Recycled Reading, There is also Rochester Textbook Exchange (which sells general used books) and Small World Books, which they did not list.
In the Rochester area, they listed Books Etc in Macedon, Dog Eared Books in Palmyra, Old Scrolls Bookshop in Stanley, and Yesterday’s Muse in Webster.
The eighth one they listed is Before Your Quiet Eyes in Rochester. This is a book seller who deals mostly online but has a storefront location where you can call and make an appointment to buy books in person.
I don’t think fewer people are reading. I think fewer people are buying books from local bookstores.
It’s probably both. This cite shows that reading for pleasure has, in fact, been declining, and, in 2017, only 19% of Americans age 15+ indicate that they read for pleasure.
Quoting from the article: