Books Are My Life

How does one become a book lover? Having books in the home when growing up is obviously one way. And all the great small town libraries are so important. When the railroad tycoons of the 19th century, particularly Carnegie, tried to ease their conscience with philanthropy, the creation of libraries and museums flourished and made a profound difference in American culture and education. I spent an incredible amount of time in our small town library, and at a rather young age the librarians finally gave up after I read all the children's books and let me read anything I wanted. Then my parents decided to turn one of our extra rooms (we lived in a 13 room house, not fancy but rather rambling) into a library and went out and purchased a very ecletic batch of several thousand books and filled the shelves. I read every one of them, a lot of them pretty dated even for the 60's, a lot of classics and biographies. This has perhaps spoiled me for a focused life, I am pretty much interested in everything, jack of all trades, master of none. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

I list on several different book sites. If something happens to any one of them, it doesn't tip the balance of my survival as a bookseller. Except one, Amazon. As time passes, the percentage of sales generated by Amazon increases, right now for me it's somewhere around 75%. They are very successful at what they do,getting their name out there, and when people think book nowadays, they think Amazon. Now Amazon is a private profit-making company, and in general I support their right to do pretty much whatever they want. But what social responsibility does such a company have to people who make their living selling through them? This applies to Ebay, and social network sites also. They may be a private company, but they function more as a public utility. I've know several people who have, rather arbitrarily, been booted off Amazon. There is no real recourse, it is next to impossible to get relisted with them. I'm sure this is sometimes justified, but Amazon considers the purchasers of their products the customer, not the person paying commissions that sells their product there. And the customer is always right, right? So in any questionable dispute, they tend to side with their 'customer', and this has obviously worked well for them. But the bookseller who is denied access to the largest medium by far for selling books is now either pretty much out of business, or hurt badly if they do manage to survive.
I'm not sure what the right answer is to this problem, as I said earlier they are a private company that has assumed some of the cachet of a public utility. What are their social responsibilities when they wield that much power? I do think they should have a much fairer and accessible review process for getting relisted. I would love to hear other's views on this.
Just in the interests of disclosure, I'm having no problems with them. In fact, they recently told me not to worry about a claim someone was making for a book order over 9 months old. But I do worry about the future of these private/public entities.

My father recently passed away, and that always causes much reflection. One thing I look back at is how our relationship was so wrapped up in books. He worked most of his life in the composing room of a newpaper, surrounded by words. He and my mother once purchased thousands of books (a really random assortment) and filled a room in our house with them. They weren't highly social people, we were a close family, and spent a lot of time in our family quietly reading somewhere (my favorite places were stretched out on an apple tree branch, or on the roof, or in my room).
My only major accident as a child involved books of course, We were going to the library in the back of our pickup truck (yes, back then we rode around in the back of pickup trucks!) and when we stopped I was standing up ready to jump out. I fell and because my arms were full of books I broke my arm in several places. I remember my father calmly picking me up, (he was almost always calm) to take me to the hospital.
Years later, my brother and I both became book dealers, and after he retired my father used to come work in my bookstore for awhile, helping with data entry. Eventually he started selling books online himself (he and my mother loved yard sales, at last he had an outlet for the stuff he'd lug home!) and believe he had a lot of enjoyment out of that. After his funeral my sister and I went to their house (they have lived with me for the last few years, but still had a house in New England full of stuff) and of course the first thing I did was go through the books, so many memories. It was the first step for me to some closure.

My favorite site that is just a book site is World Book Market, www.worldbookmarket.com . It's a dealer run site, that besides being a market place for books, concentrates on supplying tools for it's members. Some of them are incredibly useful such as: uploading of your data automatically to almost any other book site, an incredible picture management tool that lets you match up books you don't have pictures with or pictures you don't have books with, a variable weight shipping matrix so you can assign shipping rates depending on weight, and many others. They have come out recently with an incredible data base that won't be for sale, it is just available for members. Eventually it will allow variable upload times and differing price adjustments for the various book selling sites. And it is run by a very colorful group of people with an active forum where the other members really have a voice in affairs. Not everyone is allowed to join, they make sure all members are reputable book sellers. You really should check it out.