Prior to opening our first physical store The Book Shop sold collectible first edition prose and poetry primarily by catalog. To a closely-held list of collectors or through classified ads in book-centric publications, we would offer a themed, periodic or special acquisitions printed catalog, and interested book buyers would reply by mail. This is how the time-honored practice of distance selling (selling to people who didn't visit your physical location) was conducted for literally hundreds of years.

The Internet

The advent of the internet changed distance selling forever. When others were scratching their heads, saying "the internet? What's it good for?" booksellers were among the first merchants to see its potential to present large catalogs of books to book buyers all over the world via privately operated websites. Customers could use search engines to find books they'd always wanted, and pay for them right online using credit cards. Transactions that used to take days could now be accomplished in hours. And as primitive as the early internet was, online bookselling worked. It worked so well, people with actual money and internet programming expertise began to play.

We were pleased to be early adopters of online selling via such venues as ABE, Alibris, Amazon, Biblio.com, Choosebooks, eBay, Half.com and so many others, some of which have changed their names at least once, several of which have merged and all of which have celebrated ten-year anniversaries. In the early days, especially on AuctionWeb, which became eBay, book sales were phenomenal. Collectors miraculously began discovering every singe elusive volume on tattered old want lists they'd been sighingly unfolding for so long in one dusty used bookstore after another. There they were for every book lover to see, books we despaired of ever finding, right there in front of us ready to be purchased, bibliophile heaven.

This amazing goldrush of discovery and collection didn't last beyond the first couple years of online bookselling. Most want lists never grew too long and if early internet book buyers and sellers learned anything, it was that books thought scarce or even rare weren't necessarily so. Prices, too, underwent unforeseen, sometimes heartbreaking, changes as the internet revealed the true availability of books once imagined as simply unavailable beyond a special few copies. All of this was, of course, fabulous news for book buyers, and remains so.

Booksellers Adapt

Many open-shop booksellers of long-standing closed their doors in the heat of what we'll call the '90s bookrush. Many more bookstores, some of them so wonderfully familiar as to be revered by book lovers, have closed since then, citing the competition of internet book buying as their demise.

Will the internet be the death of bookselling as our parents and their parents knew it? Is the bookstore on the precipice of extinction? Of course not, not in our lifetime and not as long as there are book readers.

Most of the booksellers who were around prior to the bookrush are still in business, having wisely adapted to the new marketplace. And, we will always need good, intelligently managed local bookstores because there is frankly no substitute for them. Book readers need to browse and no matter how sophisticated the online experience becomes, nothing will replace the happenstance of reading a blurb here, digging through a stack there, and as if by magic, finding precisely what you've been looking for. Good booksellers also share qualities with the best librarians, helping you find what you're after, being able to make recommendations, and as they get to know you, putting aside books for you that they just know you won't be able to resist. And, your honest local bookstore will always be the best place to take those books with which you've decided to part.

Our Web Presence

The best of us recognize adapting to a changing marketplace as an opportunity to grow. The great bookrush of the '90s may have satisfied a pent up flurry of acquisition but it also taught book buyers that they could now almost certainly locate those long wanted books they'd previously dismissed as too difficult to pursue, or for which there just wasn't quite room on their previous lists. And book readers have been creating new want lists since they crumpled up their last ones.

We see the bookseller's job today as not terribly different than it's ever been. Our job is to acquire most every variety of books in the best possible condition, focusing as always on the fascinating world of books of reference for writers, and to offer them for sale in the most professional manner to the widest group of buyers. Therefore, we will continue to shelve in our store and offer online the best books we can find.

One change on which The Book Shop will continue to work, however, is this website. Since 1995 we've maintained a website that was intended to host our own webstore but the retail aspirations of this website just haven't lived up to our dreams. This is changing. We are now at work everyday on the suddenly accessible public domain programming that will allow us to create an online bookstore that meets our design standards, and your needs. No promises, but over the next few weeks and months we will continue to work on creating a fully searchable, completely browsable booksite from which our customers may safely purchase books they'll be glad to own.

And, as we near the completion of the online retail booksite component of this website, we haven't forgotten that many booksellers across the country have expressed interest in our project. We want every bookseller to know that once we have tested and proven our design, we do plan to offer a templatizable version for a truly modest fee.