The publishing business has improved in the past month, but not by much. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History have been monster bestsellers, but both their American publishers (Scholastic Inc and Simon & Schuster) have laid off workers recently. Large chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders report slow sales. New book sales grew only 1.3 percent from 1997 to last year.
But there's a bright spot, at least for some: the steady increase in used-book sales. A new report by Book Hunter Press, which tracks used-book stores and publishes the Used Book Lover's Guide, cites a 20 percent increase in the number of used-book dealers from 1993 to last year.
Ipsos BookTrends, a Chicago-based research firm, estimates that Americans bought 145 million used books last year, spending US$533 million.
By comparison, the Book Industry Study Group reports total non-educational book sales of US$7 billion last year.
"About one-third of trade [non-textbook] buyers bought both a new and a used book between April and December [of last year]," says Barrie Rappaport, manager of Ipsos BookTrends. "If you can save US$5 on a book, why not?"
Susan Siegel, co-owner of Book Hunter Press, suspects the Ipsos figure is actually an undercount, because most used-book sellers are small, private operators who don't report their sales.
"They say it's US$533 million," Siegel says, "but it could be US$850 million if you count online dealers."
Indeed, the Internet has become a major factor in the used-book market.
"However much money is being made," says Vincent McCaffrey, owner of the Avenue Victor Hugo used-book store in the Back Bay, "I know that because of the Internet more people are buying used books right now than ever before."
Amazon.com jumped into the used-book market last year by adding a "new or used" option to every new book listed on its site, which leads a customer to a list of small or middle-size booksellers offering the book at a deep discount to the new-book price.
Since then, both Barnes & Noble and Borders have offered links to used-book sources. Mainstream publishers and the Authors Guild, a writers group, have raised a fuss, to no avail.
"While we are glad that used-book sales are creating additional revenue for some of our booksellers," says Random House spokesman Stuart Appelbaum, "it's regrettable that neither authors nor publishers are benefiting financially."
There's no telling how many small Internet booksellers are out there, but it's so easy to become one that there may be thousands. Genevieve Kazdin of Pocasset, doing business as Dunes Studio, sells 20 to 60 books a week from her house on Cape Cod.
"I have 8,000 books," she says. "You're limited by your storage space. I don't have to leave the Cape. I live here, and this is where I want to be. This would have been impossible before the Internet. It has opened up the world of books to countless people."
Bob Ticehurst, 25, of Arlington is an especially busy bookseller. A former US Marine and accountant doing business as "Marine Bob," Ticehurst started buying books on the Internet several years ago for friends at work and discovered he could make money at it.
"It kept growing," he says. "I started advertising on the bulletin board at work. At first it was one or two books a day, then I started driving to work and paying US$30 a day to park because I had so many books in the car."
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