Yesterday, a bookseller with 52 years bookselling experience came up to me and said, "I'm going to warn you - I'll probably have a complaint filed against me." I sighed and asked for his side of the story...

Customer: How much is this book?
Bookseller: It's $24.95.
Customer: I can get it much cheaper on Amazon.
Bookseller: Well, I guess you don't need ( Read more... )

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From a Google search on the news that Amazon will be acquiring ABE ( Read more... )

A man came into the store recently and asked to speak to our General Manager. These requests usually involve complaining (and complaining bitterly) about something or someone OR asking for a donation for a volunteer group or school. Or it's just a crazy person. Occasionally two or more of these types overlap.

On this occasion, the man took our GM ( Read more... )

I sell used books on a variety of online sites. Six, in fact. I recently tried an experiment with Amazon - which I used to list on when it was available (free) via ABE (and way back during the beginning of the Z-shops). I haven't tried selling anything on Amazon in several years. Here's how my sales have broken down for the past 3 weeks ( Read more... )

So, I work at a small mall bookstore in a large chain in Canada and I just found an egregious instance of our website undercutting our in-store ordering prices. We've been advertising (in store) that if you pre-order Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows through the store you get 20% off the list price, all well and good, but here's the kicker, I ( Read more... )

So my fiancé was down at the registers the other day when a couple approached him and said that they wished to send a few magazines to a prison. We do this fairly often, as we are located near several prisons. One of the mags is in a plastic bag and my fiancé tells the guy that the bag has to be removed first. The guy asks if he could thumb through ( Read more... )

The setting: Your friendly local independant GLBT (that's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender for those of you not up on your subculture acronyms) bookstore ( Read more... )

A couple days ago I had a customer who made my mind boggle ( Read more... )

My friend Luke, who owns a bookshop in Austin, received the following set of instructions on the proper way to pack books for shipping. Luke has worked in antiquarian shops for years, and I suspect he's shipped a few thousand books in his career. That makes this list of instructions from some crazy customer all the more amusing:


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