We have always liked books. Our kids and several of our parents were serious readers. At one point I seriously considered opening a used book store. Let me tell you, if you want to really collect a lot of books in a short time, just start thinking of books as stock your "Need" for your soon to open store!!
We have at least a dozen bookcases filled with books. There are at least 50 boxes of books in the garage. An unfortunate number of the ones in the garage have been damaged by mice. I had no idea how attractive the glue in the bindings would be to the field mice that find their into the garage. Mice produce an amazing volume of feces and urine so many books are just so much paper waiting for a trip to the dump (landfill).
For the intact books I have seen two kinds of advice. The Editor at BookThink.com, which is a forum for used book sellers, advises dealers to sell all their ordinary books within the next two years. He feels that more and more of these books are digitized, at which point the value of a physical copy goes to zero. He advises his readers to focus on high value books that have some feature not present in a digital copy. In other words, a signed first edition may keep it's value, the day of the reading copy is past. He attempts to never sell books for less than $50. I will admit, if I culled our book collection at that price point, the storage requirements would go down a lot. We would have to sell bookcases.
At the same time, some of the internet marketing guys are promising profits from the sale of ordinary books using the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) system I wrote about in a previous post. I suspect their success is a result of a quirk of the FBA system that will go away as more sellers exploit it. That may take a year or two though, and we could probably move a lot of books in that time.
The main disadvantage of the FBA system is the need to spend about $250 on a barcode printer and scanner to get started. As things go, that isn't a lot of money, but you certainly need to be serious before you try it. I'm still up in the air about that.
I saw an add with a picture for metal bookshelves onCraig's List. The shelves are all metal, four feet wide, and six feet tall. They looked to be in good condition and $45 each seemed like a reasonable price. Even better the seller said they could probably deliver. I am old enough that my knees and back appreciate having someone else do the heavy lifting.
We made arrangements for delivery and I cleaned out the space in the garage where I wanted to put them. At the last minute I decided to set them on cinder blocks. That brings the bottom shelf up a little so it is easier to reach and also keeps the metal off the floor which sometimes gets wet. The delivery went well and I am pleased with the new space.
The economic indicator part of this post title came from my conversation with the guy delivering the shelves. He said he was 55 years old and had been a commercial real estate broker, a commercial mortgage lender, and in the used equipment business as more of a hobby. That has changed. He says commercial real estate is dead, the commercial lending business is holding up reasonably well, and the used equipment business is growing like crazy.
He is partnered with a younger, more technical guy, and they mostly buy and sell high end computer gear. $10-20,000 server setups for example. The shelves he was delivering were from a situation where they had to agree to take everything from the space, not just the stuff they wanted. After the purchase they discovered they had to break down all the shelving in order to get it down the stairs. As he said "that kind of messed up the deal for them."
This guy is located in Albuquerque, a town of about 500,000, and said they have three warehouses full of stuff. They have found some commercial space to lease and plan to move their stuff there in the near future. He said they figured they were already paying to store stuff they might as well have a location where prospects could look over the goods.
I asked how Craig's list was treating them and he said it did pretty good. There is a lot of spam. For example, if you are trying to sell a car you will get a lot of emails from people who want you to list the car on their website. Lots of others hope to get you to open their email and load a virus onto your system. He said they no longer respond to people who don't include a name, email address, and/or phone number. In some cases they instruct the prospect to insert a certain phrase into the subject line or they won't even open the email.
I'm sure not every one has the mental courage to make the transition from commercial real estate broker to peddler, but it seems to be working for him. I'm sure his contacts with the business world help him find stuff to buy. His own need for space no doubt keeps him active in the market and current on rental rates. I'm sure he got a killer deal on the new space.
A more subtle success factor, that many would miss, is that he had to start doing this while he still had financial resources to work with. He had to have, or be able to borrow, enough money to buy merchandise, have a truck(s) and equipment to move it, and a place to store it until it sells. No matter how cheaply he buys this still runs into serious money. He had to make the decision to go in this direction while he still could.
I have read many times that a recession is a good time to start a business. The shelves I got are still labeled "Furr's Case Pleadings" which tells me they came out of a legal firms records room. I'm sure they paid a lot more than $45 each when they bought they new!
