I thought everybody kind of knew this already, but the best way to buy books is now officially used and online. Apparently the statistics are starting to reveal the extent of the evolution of book-buying as the NY Times notes in a recent article:

In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books, a trend that calls into question the future of brick-and-mortar stores devoted to used books, according to a study financed by the publishing industry and released yesterday.

The authors’ and publishers’ guilds have been throwing a fit about this trend, directing a special petulance toward Amazon.com for the devious act of allowing its users to purchase new and used books on the same page. Since I believe supply is supply and demand is demand, I find it fairly ludicrous to get upset about something like this. Perhaps the publishing industry should follow the lead of their MPAA brethren and join them in developing technology to thwart and alienate their customers, perhaps some form of IED that explodes the book if read more than once or a biometric security mechanism that allows only the retina of the authorized owner of the book to see the words on the page.

All in all, there are some very good economic reasons for the dodo-ization of the neighborhood used-book store. Most center around market efficiencies - vastly larger inventories online, greater incentives for bookowners to sell when they connect directly to buyers and cut out the middleman, lower search costs for buyers, shorter time for books to make it onto the secondary market - and all point to the used book store going the way of the travel agent.

So where to buy? The best of the best, in MHO - Amazon.com, click the ‘used and new link’ below the ‘Add to Shopping Cart’ button to see used book prices and descriptions, and the ‘Sell Yours Here’ button if you have one you’d like to get money in exchange for, also Alibris.com if you’re like me, have a wee bit of a book fetish and it matters if the books you buy are quarto, cloth-bound, with that cottony feel to the paper (pre-1940’s).

Read full the article: Internet Grows as Factor in Used-Book Business, also check out the research by Ghose, Smith & Telang, Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Product Cannibalization and Welfare Impact that shows the impact of the online used-book market is less than publishers fear and more beneficial to general book-buying habits than they think.