Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2007 Issue
The Year just Past, the Year Ahead
Book buyers have many choices
If the seller is more accountable they are also able to reach a larger market. Material that could not have been sold ten years ago is selling today although the price it brings may be market derived rather than crystal-ball generated. It sells and that's a very good thing.
In the Bible it says the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. If the net is introducing democracy to a field that has long been autocratic it is also bringing new buyers. Millions of people are interested in old books and the web gives them a way to find appealing material. Perhaps one category of buyer will dominate book buying in the next ten years: those who purse their personal history. There has always been an interest in personal history but it's never been easy to find. The net has been changing this for years. What's different now is that Google is capturing the full text of old material and making it possible for collectors to identify material as relevant that they could never have identified before. Personal relevance is an entirely different and more powerful basis for book, manuscript and ephemera collecting. In the era of "it's all about me" this is very powerful stuff.
So looking out into 2007 it looks to be a very good year for both buyers and sellers. In the antiquarian and collectible field material enters the online marketplaces at the rate of 3,000 to 4,000 items a day. They are thrown into the Ganges, the Hudson, the Thames, the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Murray, and the Danube and they all flow into the sea which is increasingly one market worldwide: the web. There we find them: the crappy and the commonplace knee to jowl with the unspeakable gem. Wow.
