Rare Book Monthly
AbeBooks Survey: Who Is Selling Books Today? Who's Buying?
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"The fear about fewer young people reading is a concern shared by the AbeBooks.com organization. As a business, we require young people to be inspired by books and to read, and also to collect. The traditional AbeBooks customer is an older, professional person but we are keen to reach out to younger readers -- that's where the next generation of collectors will come from. We try to balance our marketing efforts between satisfying existing customers and attracting new ones, particularly younger ones. Of course, people reading less is a social issue when youngsters can now choose between computer games, the internet, television and books to fill their spare time. As you say, there are no easy answers - we just try to celebrate books and champion the people who sell them."
Richard Davis' impressions of the market are consistent with our own. The decline in prices of some (though certainly not all) books is clearly a supply and demand issue. Books for which there once appeared to be little supply have proven to be much more common than was thought after the internet made copies visible. Add to that the effect of the ‘net in drawing more old books out of the woodwork (or attic), and you have a supply/demand imbalance. This may eventually even out, but it will take time.
As for the issue of young people reading less, that is a fact of life. And, to the extent they do read, much of it may come from a computer screen connected to the internet. Book collecting is to a large extent a nostalgia enterprise, and this generation has fewer experiences with books over which to become nostalgic. However, everyone gets nostalgic for something from their youth as they move past childhood. Those memories may well be bound within the pages of books, even if these people were not heavy readers when they were young. Besides which, people like to collect "things," and recollections of YouTube videos are not the type of "things" you can place on a shelf or table.
We expect the different types of experiences of today's youth will lead to the development of different types of collections in the future. Perhaps we will see "multimedia" collections -- ones that include items like photographs, broadsides, signs, promotional objects, videos and recordings, and other ephemera together with books. These collections, rather than being a library of Mark Twain first editions, may include various items pertaining to something like rafting on the Mississippi (or perhaps on some more adventuresome rapids). They may more closely reflect the owner's personal experiences and memory than does a collection of old first editions. Books may be a part, rather than the entirety of this collection. This is not to diminish the collecting of old first editions. Some will always treasure firsts, just as there will always be people who listen to blues and folk and Dixieland music. It's just that a large portion of the next generation will likely have different tastes, based on different experiences, and booksellers who are able to recognize these new collector interests and best accommodate them are the ones most likely to succeed.
