It shouldn't be news that the changing habits of readers, in particular the increase in the popularity of ebooks, has played havoc with bricks and mortars bookstores. But a new wrinkle strikes awfully close to home. Reading my local newspaper tonight, I learned that JR Trading Company is going out of business. As the headline proclaimed, "E-books hurt the sale of actual books in So. Bruns.".
What I find interesting is that JR Trading Company is not a bookstore. They're not even a traditional book distributor. They're a wholesale distributor of remaindered books. In case you don't know, remaindered books are copies that publishers make available at a deep discount, from their remaining inventory, when they put a book out of print. Because at some point, every book goes out of print.
A book goes out of print when the publisher decides that he's made just about all the money he can expect to make from a title, when the cost to warehouse the remaining inventory exceeds what the publisher expects to make on future sales. So the publisher puts the book out of print and sells the remaining copies, at a deep discount, to companies like JR Trading Company. And then companies like JR Trading Company sell the books to discount book stores, who make the books available to the general public at bargain basement prices.
But ebooks are already available at bargain basement prices. And ebooks don't cost money to warehouse. So ebooks don't go out of print. And companies like JR Trading Company go out of business.
The JR Trading Company warehouse is just a couple of miles from my home. As wholesalers, their customers were retail book sellers, not individual readers. But once or twice a year, they would open their warehouse to the general public. And I would make a point to be there, going home with bags full of the most extraordinary books.
This Saturday will be the final warehouse sale at JR Trading Company. Because of my schedule, I will miss the going out of business sale. More importantly, I will miss the business.
Comments (7)
Sorry they went out of business. I was and still am sad that Borders is gone.
Well, you didn't write this piece in a book for others to read. You wrote it on a blog.
Therefore, I blame you.
That's a stretch there, Theo
That's very sad. I am not interested in e-books, Kindles, Nooks, whatever. I like to hold a real page turning book in my hand. I get my books, mostly PBs, from Half-Price Books or Amazon online.
Yeah, Dan, blogging is not the same as full length fiction/non-ficktion. You have to be kidding.
We borrowed a friends kindle and did not like it. The book sores here are all closed and we buy our books off of amazon.
Is this due to eBooks, or the economy in general ? My coworkers and I trade books regularly; eBooks have not yet taken hold in our demographic. Received my latest care package from Amazon today, in fact.
I miss Borders SO much. That store was to me, what your warehouse was to you. I have been able to get a few books online though... again it feels like that is part of the problem.. I am definitely not a fan of ebooks but I do purchase a lot of my books from websites... am
Ipart of the problem?