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Old whine, used bottles

As if authors and publishers don’t have enough to worry about, a consulting firm in the U.S. has just released a chilling — but at this point highly speculative — report on the effects of online used-book sales on the publishing industry. An article on ecommercetimes.com summarizes the report (released by publishing consultant Market Partners International), which claims that while sales of new books have remained virtually flat for two years, the used-book market is seeing steady increases in both sales and market share. Almost all the publishing and bookselling professionals interviewed for the article agree that, though there’s nothing new about selling used books, what has changed in the last decade is the easy access, broad selection, and low prices afforded to consumers by online booksellers such as Amazon.com, who list cheaper used copies alongside listings of their new books. There isn’t a lot of hard data to support these speculations, but one analysis of recent consumer surveys by Ipsos BookTrends said that “15 percent of all books for adults and teenagers that were purchased from April to December 2003 were used ones, an increase of five percentage points from the like period in 2002.”

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