Baldwin’s Book Barn – End of an era

Maybe that is why Baldwin’s sells on Amazon
Baldwin’s sells on Amazon as well as eBay.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/shops/storefront/index.html?ie=UTF8&marketplaceID=ATVPDKIKX0DER&sellerID=A30MNVHBMSQIF1

The store is up for sale. In the blog post linked to above the blogger thinks that the store will not sell because of the economy. There is no indication that the store is not making money. The current owner has to move on at some point and it looks like this is when he wants to move on.

>I’m sure that if the owner could have sold the Book Barn to someone to run as a bookstore, he would have.

They are not even advertising on their website that the store is for sale. If they want to sell the store they need to get the word out.

Also Birdie you need to distinguish between the new and used book market. It looks like Baldwin is in the used book market. The used book marketplace is doing fine. What is a difficult market is selling new books. There has been a crisis in the new book market for the last 50 years. The economics of selling new books has always been messy.

Take a look at this book: In Cold Type: Overcoming the Book Crisis

Know when it was written? 1997 when Amazon was starting to take over? 2002 when the Internet was even more dominant in bookselling? Nope the book was written in 1982. Internet was not causing the book crisis in 1982. Leonard Shatzkin was in the publishing industry and he wrote this book to point out the numerous problems in the book publishing industry. Leonard Shatzkin’s son Mike runs the IdeaLogical company that does consulting for the book industry. Here is a blog post by Mike about his father Leonard that gives the credentials of the father. “In Cold Type” is a book that the publishing industry should have acted upon.

The problems and unnecessary expenses created by an inefficient publishing industry hurts independent bookstores trying to sell new books. Shatzkin raised the problem of remainder books in his 1982 book.

Birdie remember the danger of a single story. You single story is the problems with independant bookstores is Amazon. The problem is much more complicated than that.