Some more food for your head and things you might consider reading.
Artwork by Michael23
One book about a way to simply be more enviornmentally conscious or go green if you will. By way of selling or recycling those used books of yours...
Selling Used Books Online by Stephen Windwalker
A How to Book for Online Bookselling
Selling Used Books Online: The Complete Guide to Bookselling at Amazon's Marketplace and Other Online Sites, is the complete title of this little gem written by used book selling entrepreneur Stephen Windwalker. In a fair review of this book, one must address an issue that has come up many times since I started selling books in January of 2000. The question is simple, but what with what the average reader really wants to know when they pick up Selling Used Books Online by Stephen Windwalker for the first time.
"How do you sell books and make any money at it?"
A valid question but not always easy to explain in a quick conversation, but if you are serious about exploring online bookselling I cannot recommend a better place to start. Windwalker is a successful bookseller as the owner and manager of Windwalker Books, an online bookseller since 1999, and a former long-time member of the American Booksellers Association and owner his own independent retail bookstore.
He gives his wealth of experience to the newbie in this crash course for booksellers which is filled with simple and detailed information anyone can apply without great effort or understanding of the bookselling business as a whole. The book was influential on my all aspects of my new venture into e-tailing, plus gave my mind the insight of practical business methods that would become the model for my standards down the road.
On the front cover it makes the following claim - " For Online Booksellers, Authors, Independent Publishers, Public Libraries, and Software Authors. Whether your bookselling vision is brick-and-mortar, click-and-mortar, dot-com or dream-on, this is the book that will take you to the next level." Selling Used Books Online by Stephen Windwalker is all that it claims to be even today, but a reference for so many new Internet resalers of various kinds.
For some readers who question if my opinion is valid as an independent bookseller alone, here are a few other industry persons and their quotes on Windwalker's work :
"A wealth of information about the bookselling business, including descriptions of major online bookselling resources complete with detailed fee structures."- News Update, A Friends of Libraries U.S.A. Publication.
"Incredible business resource.... an experienced authority candidly describes the pitfalls and the realities of ... book dealing with no punches withheld." - from Bob Spear, Heartland Reviews, October 2002.
"Thousands of book enthusiasts are selling books online. If you'd like to join their ranks, this book is a must-read."- Rebecca Hanneman, About.com, October 2002.
These are just a few praises for Windwalker and his books.
The author was not only influential with this book, but has remained a big name in the book biz to this day.
When I got a copy of Windwalker's book for the first time, I had been selling for over three years - and I found that this book not only explained what I had already learned in detail, it also predicted the pit falls that I would eventually find as I progressed longer in the used book industry. It discusses every issue of bookselling in basic terms and makes no assumptions about your level of business savvy or experience.
This book is a little outdated in one sense, the bookselling market of today has expanded greatly since it's publication. Yet it is still informative enough to be useful, and there are very few books that cover the span of information that is relevant to the newbie or the expert bibliophile equally. It covers a wealth of topics that every used retailer of books should examine to be successful at any level - acquisition of books, choice of books, where to sell, rating / accurate descriptions online, posting / pricing guidelines, mailing / postal services, packaging / delivery issues, business organization, taxes, customer service, inventory management, order fulfillment and planning for the future expansion of your home business.
Windwalker covers in some detail the different third party sites that existed at the time of publication including Amazon, Abe, Alibris, Ebay, Half.com, Biblio, and Tom Folio. All of the information is still useful in making informed decisions on joining with any of these sites currently. Today there are just more independent sites available to the selling market than before.
Windwalker eludes to this predicatively, and gives opinions of the future market that he sees in the future. As I said, the only downfall of this book is that it is becoming outdated - yet still is probably the best primer of its kind for the used book retail industry. "The advent of online used bookselling has greatly lowered the stakes involved in failing as a used bookseller. Instead of losing anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 and having to hire a lawyer to negotiate one's way out of a multi-year lease and a mountain of publisher and distributor debt, a failed online used bookseller might lose $500 and a lot of time and effort. But it remains true that many will fail. It doesn't have to be this way, so our mission with this book is three-fold:
First, we hope that by providing a candid look at the nitty-gritty of used bookselling, to persuade a significant number of people to do something else for which they may be better suited;
Second, we believe we can provide and organize information and suggestions that may accelerate progress on the learning curve and make the difference between success and failure for a significant number of current and future online used booksellers; and
Third, we hope to improve the overall quality and market strength of online used bookselling by helping sellers to raise the bar when it comes to customer service and fulfillment, business practices and efficiencies, diversity of offerings, and pricing strategy, so that the ensuing improvement in customer experience will ultimately mean more customers and more selling for the sellers." - Stephen Windwalker, Selling Used Books Online, 2002.
To quote the 20th century literary critic and memoirist Anatole Broyard: "To own a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world."
Artwork by Blake4d
And here is just something I think everyone should take a serious look at. For many reasons...
The Nag Hammadi Library by James Robinson
A Classical Archive of Ancient Western Knowledge
The Nag Hammadi Library by James Robinson is the collection of documents that has been the cause of great controversy since being discovered in the 1940s. The body of documents put together by James Robinson in this work, is a collection as important to the Historical roots of Christianity as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Nag Hammadi Library been influential all the way to the modern century having inspired not only scholars, but also artists and musicians from around the world. This edition by James Robinson is clearly editorially above and beyond the normal for a translation based work of this type. This English edition is a must have for theologians and historical scholars alike. Most notably among artists like Current 93 and Nurse with Wound, who recorded Sister albums around the most important poetic piece of the works "Thunder Perfect Mind". Also the author Phillip K. Dick wrote his master piece "Valis"., around the belief that he was channel ling a new Exegesis of thought and human history. In fact Dick dd not live to see he Nag Hammadi made available to the general public, and the detailed understanding he demonstrated in this book is uncanny, if not able to make the most true skeptic ponder the what ifs of Phillip's claims. Also notable is the 1979 novel by Harold Bloom, 'The Flight of Of Lucifer : A Gnostic Fantasy.' In any event, the Nag Hammadi has given great understanding to a period of human history that has had much shadow cast over it. And also gave a much more elaborate insight into the proto-Christian movement known as Gnosticism. But today their importance has become astoundingly clear: There are many reasons to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in a myriad of esoteric Christian and non-Christan concepts, let alone the translation is one of the most professionally careful ever having been done in the realm of Western theology. Well worth the energy your mind may have to expend on it. These thirteen papyrus codices containing fifty-two sacred texts are representatives of the long lost "Gnostic Gospels", a last extant testament of what orthodox Christianity perceived to be its most dangerous and insidious challenge, the feared opponent that the Church Fathers had reviled under many different names, but most commonly as Gnosticism. The Nag Hammadi library consists of twelve books, plus eight leaves of a thirteenth book. There are a total of fifty-two tracts. These are now kept in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and, as the name suggests, are written in Coptic, although it is clear that the texts are Coptic translations of earlier Greek works. Coptic is the Egyptian language written with the Greek alphabet; there are different dialects of Coptic, and the Nag Hammadi library shows at least two. They were found in codex form (book form rather than scroll form). They were discovered in the mid 1940s, just a few years prior to the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls (another reason for the combination of the texts in the public imagination). Included in these texts are The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Truth, The Gospel of Mary and other gospel contenders (alas, in fragmentary form--the translation in this volume however is the complete Nag Hammadi text). The Gospel of Thomas has perhaps been the highest profile text from Nag Hammadi; it has been translated and commented upon extensively, particularly in modern scholarship which discusses gospel development. "Gnosis" and "Gnosticism" are still rather arcane terms, though in the last two decades they have been increasingly encountered in the vocabulary of contemporary society. The word Gnosis derives from Greek and connotes "knowledge" or the "act of knowing". On first hearing, it is sometimes confused with another more common term of the same root but opposite sense: agnostic, literally "not knowing". The Greek language differentiates between rational, propositional knowledge, and a distinct form of knowing obtained by experience or perception. It is this latter knowledge gained from interior comprehension and personal experience that constitutes gnosis." In the first century of the Christian era the term "Gnostic" came to denote a heterodox segment of the diverse new Christian community. Among early followers of Christ it appears there were groups who delineated themselves from the greater household of the Church by claiming not simply a belief in Christ and his message, but a "special witness" or revelatory experience of the divine. It was this experience or gnosis that set the true follower of Christ apart, so they asserted. Stephan Hoeller explains that these Christians held a "conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life." It was on a December day in the year of 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, that the course of Gnostic studies was radically renewed and forever changed. An Arab peasant, digging around a boulder in search of fertilizer for his fields, happened upon an old, rather large red earthenware jar. Hoping to have found a buried treasure, and with due hesitation and apprehension about the jinn who might attend such a hoard, he smashed the jar open. Inside he discovered no treasure and no genie, but instead books: more than a dozen old codices bound in golden brown leather. Little did he realize that he had found an extraordinary collection of ancient texts, manuscripts hidden a millennium and a half before -- probably by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius seeking to preserve them from a destruction ordered by the church as part of its violent expunging of heterodoxy and heresy. How the Nag Hammadi manuscripts eventually passed into scholarly hands is a fascinating story too lengthy to relate here.The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts has fundamentally revised our understanding of both Gnosticism and the early Christian church. The Nag Hammadi Library is a scholastic piece of history that is a must read for the true esoteric scholar.
"Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic..." - Arthur C. Clarke
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