A blog from the bookshop about collecting books on collecting, James Patterson and reading the American teenager and some sort ramble

The last time I went around my bookshop looking up all the books and making sure they were cheaper than you could buy them on the internet was about eighteen months ago and I have just started the process again.

I started today on the antiques and collecting section, I have only done the bit covering clocks and instruments. There is marked change to last time I did this, which is mostly that the steady reduction in prices seems to have levelled out.

The main way I determine the right price for a book is to look it up on Amazon and then check it against the sold listings on ebay. A key here being that anyone can list anything online for any price they like, but the history of people actually buying something and what they have paid for it is a very different thing.

When I last adjusted the prices of the books on my shelves I would say around half of them had sold for less on ebay in three months prior to looking them up. Of course this does mean that around 50% could have been bought cheaper in my bookshop.

This time the amount those that have sold cheaper on ebay than I have them on the selves for is around 10%. Sorting out the antiques and collecting section this way just isn’t enough to produce a large enough amount of price reductions to keep the stock alive so I have resorted to the pre internet method of reducing books that have been on the shelf too long as well.

I have decided that the way forward with non-fiction sections is to make part of them entirely books that are priced for less than £1.

The pricing structure in my bookshop means that books priced for less than £20 go out on the shelves the rest go on shelving behind the till and people have to ask to look at them. a major factor here is that many expensive books are expensive because they are delicate item that have survived in fine condition, so this is an essential.

This picture shows the clock part of the book stock that isn’t out on the shelves priced between £20 and £200

You then go onto clock related books that are more expensive.

Or you can go out on a limb with the fragile stuff that is both very scarce but not that expensive.

I have also been labelling up the craft section that I sorted out recently.

The old problem of small and delicate books I have tried to solve here with a separate bookcase.

On to James Patterson who has started a campaign to save the book, part of which is to petition the president of America and senior politician to be see regularly carrying a book. You can look on his facebook page if you want to know more about this https://www.facebook.com/JamesPatterson

The main thing that this is about is that in America the teenage reading problem seems to have gone critical.

The average American teenager watches more than three hours of video entertainment a day...And reads books for less than eight minutes a week. As the amount of reading people do is directly related to how the succeed in life, their ability to concentrate and the standard of education the achieve this is a serious one.         

Using the internet and even e-books isn’t the whole answer, I myself am researching various aspects of historic shipbuilding at the moment and on several occasions have bought e-books or in one case a print on demand book where either the print quality or the gibberish related to ocr was so bad that I have just bought the expensive original book.

With young people however I am concerned that a very big issue is that they learn by example and if their parents aren’t seen by them to be reading books, borrowing books from the library, buying books and owning books then they are less likely to read themselves. I don’t think mum and dad staring at a gadget cuts the mustard, even if the gadget is some sort of electronic reader.

The ramble comes next, the Manston issue is still rumbling on online, however my take is that it isn’t in the forefront of most people’s minds at the moment, however I will try my best to summarise the position at the moment next.  

Well I have just had a glance at the Save Manston Airport Facebook page and at the moment a lot of the members seem convinced that cabinet are going to turn down the cpo so there is much ranting about not voting for the cabinet.

I think the point that has perhaps been missed is that you would have to be a resident in a particular member’s ward to vote for them and of course most of the cabinet members have safe seats anyway.

Delving deeper there, convincing arguments; like instead of the council listening to their own solicitors to see if the firms wishing to deal with the council pose any risk to the council why don’t the council listen to the solicitors of the firms wishing to deal with the council.   

To be honest it wasn’t a very encouraging delve regardless of what your intentions are for the Manston site. I suppose anything makes sense one you have formed a Delaware LLC or a Virgin Islands company.

 Since moving the blog here nearly all of the old spam comments have disappeared and I am getting a much more realistic idea of the number of people reading the current active posts as the stats don’t include all the people accessing the thousands of old posts on Thanetonline. The active readership seems to be about 250 per day, but I am developing a completely new type of spam from people trying to promote their books.