Browsing the Bookshelves

By coincidence, some else has had a rant about cheap books today which may go some way to providing an explanation for my dilemma on cheap books and profit (see here).  Having ordered a handful of 50p books, they asked for a quote for shipping. The quote came back at around £35.  For that price, I could send an entire pallet of paperbacks, that's around 1500, have way across the country. If that is a fair price for sending 9 paperbacks by Royal Mail a distance of some 100 miles, the books must be bound in lead! 

Still, doesn't quite explain the penny sellers on Amazon, where shipping costs are fixed (and at a reasonable level).  Curiousier and curiousier.

I bought three John Sutherland books today. Each cost me the princely sum of a penny. Yep, three books for 3p.  All purchased via the marketplace on Amazon.co.uk.  I buy lots of books, all the time. It's sort of a requirement for being a second hand bookseller. But these three were for me, so I was prepared to a risk on condition and delivery times (something I would never do if I was buying for a customer).  I'll have to wait to see what they actually look like when they arrive, assuming they do. Each was described as being in very good condition.

But what really gets me is how the sellers can possibly be making a profit by selling the book for a penny.  Amazon charge sellers 17.5 per cent of the list price plus 86p per item for book sales.  If sellers are registered as professional merchants, the commission is same but the flat per sale fee waived and replaced by a monthly subscription charge of £28.50.  For VAT registered business, who can reclaim the VAT, the costs will come down to £25 per month subscription plus 15 per cent of the list price per sale.

For evey book sale, Amazon charge the buyer £2.75 for delivery, £2.32 of which is passed onto the marketplace seller. So if a VAT registered, pro-merchant seller sells a book for a penny, they will receive £2.33 in total.  Out of that, an allowance has to be made for a portion of the monthly fee.  Even if books are acquired for free, there are still the costs of cataloguing, cleaning and storing the books, picking them when an order comes in, the time involved in packing, the costs of packaging and the postage costs (which also include the costs of getting the packages to the post office or paying for mail collection).  Even for the lightest of paperbacks, postage itself will be at least 80 pence, the cost of an jiffy envelope (which many sellers use, but really isn't adequate protection for a book in transit) around 20 pence.  That leaves around £1.30 to pay for the monthly subscription, cataloguing, cleaning, storage, picking, packing time and delivery to Royal Mail.  How do these guys make a profit? I wish I knew the secret.