There are some people who change your life forever. And I mean totally change. I first met Olga on the forums on eBay where she taught me so much. A number of us met for lunch one day and have been firm friends ever since. I can honestly say I am a different person for having been included in that first lunch. I have been hoping to get a guest post from Olga for a while as she knows an enormous amount about books and eBay and I always expected her to be an excellent writer. It is quite lengthy so grab a coffee and settle in for a very informative read.

For years I have watched the blame game being played.

With the popularity of eBay soaring back in the mid-2000′s, second-hand bookstore owners were blaming eBay for the decline in sales. Mail order catalogues, books wrapped in brown paper, the smell of old books in a dark little shop, the eccentric owner who kept you in the shop at least half an hour longer than you intended gabbing on about nothing in particular, all of this was falling by the wayside. Dying was the ritual of scouring the bricks and mortar offerings of the used bookseller community. After all, people could now shop from home, and usually pay less.

eBay certainly has generated a lot of amateur booksellers, collectible sellers, antique sellers and other small business of all sorts (that I have far less interest in). It’s ruined the retail industry, so the store owners claimed.

I don’t disagree.

Certainly, a great deal of eBay sellers didn’t offer the service and knowledge a professional bookseller did. But for years collectors had been limited to abebooks for online buying, with it’s bland descriptions and lack of photos, suddenly there was an alternative. A much cheaper alternative. Amateur sellers usually equals a bargain price. So with the novelty still there, the trust still there, a good economy, eBay was flourishing. Everything was easy, simple, sales rolled in and books went out.

The buyers blamed the professional booksellers for being “too expensive” I can get it cheaper on eBay.

But around 2006 eBay started getting a little Amazon-envy. And for the booksellers who’d been selling cheap used books on there for several years already, it was the beginning of a disastrous period for bookselling on eBay, one that has yet to recover.

eBay decided it wanted to clear out the “rubbish”, the cheap listings, things that took a long time to sell, and have a brand new shiny marketplace full of electrical goods and other boring things. They wanted the small collectible seller out, and the corporate monsters in. By doubling the fees, they certainly managed to force a lot of people out. By marketing their ridculous propaganda slogans they had sellers bleating “Core, core, core” like so many brainwashed zombies. (Incidentally the “core item” term, meaning an auction style listing rather than fixed price, has quietly disappeared). It was our fault that book might take up to a couple of years to sell. You know, as there is a huge marketplace for that book on a rare fungi that only grows on the trunk of a tree in a far-off forest in…you get the picture. Bricks and mortar stores are no different. I admit Therese (of Mcleod’s books) and I used to have a competition to see who’d sell a Leonard Maltin movie guide first as these were always an unwanted by-product in remainder book cartons. Therese won, as a matter of fact. I think she has sold two.

It’s something you take in good humour. But eBay didn’t want it. After a long period where a lot of sellers concentrated on building websites and listing on the Australian auction site Oztion, eBay grew bigger. Some sellers never went back, some drifted back slowly. After all, Google may be bigger than eBay but most people look on eBay first. You can’t beat the traffic. In the meantime, book sales were taking a dive. The “de-cluttering” eBay had done made no real difference to sales. By around 2008 the novelty was wearing off, the bad press was rife, and eBay was losing it’s shine.

The buyers may have blamed the sellers, but the sellers blamed eBay.

Blaming eBay is a popular sport. Usually a perfectly justifiable one. While eBay couldn’t seem to get it through their thick skulls that the days of mad bidding on auctions was over, and people just wanted to “Buy It NOW” they clung to the slim hope that their plan would work. I fondly remember a seller ranting on an eBay forum that “people don’t want to hang around for seven days to buy a three dollar lipstick”

They most certainly don’t.

They spent two years messing around with everything on the site, searches, rules, user agreements, the failed attempt at forcing Paypal as the sole payment method, ridiculous and convoluted rules about feedback that have changed a dozen times or more. Nothing, it seemed, was luring the buyer back. The economy was taking a dive, and people just weren’t interested in eBay anymore.

So they upped the fees again.

That might be a slightly unfair statement, as the new fee structure benefitted sellers in other categories a great deal, with a higher listing fee and lower final value fee. For booksellers, it meant the fees practically doubled overnight. eBay’s explanation was that (and I was told this on the phone by a slightly nervous representative who had probably been shouted at all day by eBay sellers) no-one was interested in auctions anymore and they were trying to structure the site to be mainly fixed price items.

Really?

I calmly explained they would be better off having a fee structure for media items with lower listing fees and higher final value fees as they had in the US, thanked him, and proceeded to lose money hand over fist for months. This was the final straw for a lot of small sellers, who gave up altogether. We struggled along, waiting for them to come to their senses.

Thankfully, they did.

But in the meantime the book market on eBay was changing. Huge websites from the United Kingdom were creeping in, offering books at below Australian wholesale prices, including free shipping.

The Aussie buyer started blaming the bookseller again.

How can they buy a book for $8.00 – $12.00 including shipping, that costs $20- $22 here? Plus shipping? And shipping for a book under 500 grams being around the $6.00 mark, and over that, most regular hardcovers, more than $10? Less than half price?

How indeed? The booksellers blamed the publishing industry.

I get a 30-35% discount off retail buying from Australian publishers. I would have to mark that up 35% to retail price. Then charge $6-10 shipping. Because Australia Post has no discounted national rates.

I can blame Australia Post too.

But suddenly eBay has gotten in some huge Australian booksellers who have dropped about a million (I am not inflating those numbers) titles on eBay within the space of a few days.

While I thought that in my particular niche, out-of-print books, that I would be relatively safe. That was before they started dropping print-on-demand books, which are pretty much a photocopied book, into the search results. (Not even legal here due to copyright laws but they can be purchased from the US). Now to stretch my memory there used to be a few hundred thousand books on eBay.

Today there is 2,819,625.

As a result, the book search is flooded beyond belief. eBay even backed up and canned the identical listings (sellers listing 20 copies of an identical book to take up a page in search results)

It has still not improved.

Now the retail giants tell us they want to charge GST on online purchases because they’re suffering. I fail to see how a 10% charge on a $10 book is going to make a difference when the book still costs $20+ to buy here. They’ll pay the extra dollar. Happily.

Why? Consumers are angry. They feel ripped off, the economy is bad, spending is down, and people will do anything they can to try and save money. There is a very small contingent of people who will pay more for goods to try and put money back into the local economy.

Meanwhile the publishers continue to produce over-priced books.

Meanwhile the bookseller continues to struggle on trying to sell used books when consumers can purchase them new, for used book prices.

Ebay is weighed down by an incredible amount of generic, repetitive listings, identical photos of the same title with people competing to undercut each other by a few cents.

I don’t hold out much hope for the used book market. The writing has been on the wall for too long, we’ve all seen it coming, starting with those bricks and mortar owners blaming eBay for the demise of the local second-hand bookshop, down to ebay sellers blaming the corporate monsters for crushing them.

The romance is gone. The used book market is failing. And everything is failing us. Who’s to blame? Or is there even a point in playing out this decade-long game?

Olga Hughes owns Crickhollow Books with her partner Craig. She is a passionate reader and a quite mad book collector, and loves children’s books, to the horror of most regular people. You can read her blog at Crickhollow Books.