All books in the last ~50 years have a barcode already printed on them, and an ISBN printed inside. Any phone camera can read these. If you assume 15 seconds per book at pace, 40 books per shelf, 6 shelves per bookcase, and 30 bookcases in the average store, complete digitization of a collection should take only ...
Edit: Responding comment is quite right, original calculation mistaken. It's 4AM here. 40 × 6 × 30 = 7200 books × 15 seconds ÷ 60 ÷ 60 = 30 hours, so <4 days assuming 8 hour days. Or 1 day if you can speed up to 5 seconds per book.
Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore. I think you're shy a factor of 3 or 4 on the amount of labor it would take to digitize a book store, given my experience with running inventory at retail shops. Maybe it could be worth it if there was an inventory management system that could automatically post the books for sale on an internet platform, but if every used book store posted their entire inventory online the market for many titles would be flooded and it would be a race to the bottom.
Ultimately all physical retails spaces have the same common problem -- why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online. This problem is even bigger during covid-19. I personally think there are two answer, one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for. If you're making unique products it might be best to pivot online. If you're into the classic buy wholesale sell retail business than the online market can be very competitive.
A used book store can be a great place to have experiences. Authors can come and talk, you can have children story time, book clubs can meet, coffee shops pair well with book stores. You have to clear inventory to make space for experiences, but you can use it as an opportunity to remove inventory that wasn't selling anyway.
"Ultimately all physical retails spaces have the same common problem -- why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online. ...I personally think there are two answer, one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for."
This is a great observation. I think that every business looking at option 1 would run away in terror, as that would mean competing directly with Amazon. My local bookstores have pursued this to some degree out of necessity in covid times, but it doesn't seem sustainable, and I never got the impression that they prioritized it.
The bookstores local to me that have thrived have pursued the latter strategy with events, but primarily by having an opinionated selection that is a joy to browse. Amazon cannot compete on this for two reasons:
First, they cannot have a uniquely opinionated selection. They can have an "Amazon" selection, which will by its nature be the lower common denominator, or they can have a "personalized" selection, which will by its nature play to the customer's pre-existing interests and the generic global recommendation insights from Amazon's ML models. People do have lists on Amazon, but this isn't a profitmaking endeavour worth a full time commitment. No single perspective will be rich enough to engross the consumer for more than a minute or two, or call them to return regularly.
Second is that Amazon does not provide the physical experience of browsing physical books.
As you said, this still leaves the problem: even given all the above, why wouldn't someone just browse the in person bookstore and buy the books online? Thankfully, the survival of these stores shows that there enough buyers are "non-rational" to financially support the experiences they enjoy.
> This is a great observation. I think that every business looking at option 1 would run away in terror, as that would mean competing directly with Amazon.
I don't think pivoting online is a suicidal move for many business, but it takes a different type of mindset to make it work. I'd like to highlight heatonist.com as an example of someone doing it right. It's a NYC based hot sauce boutique with a web presence. They create quality web content and use it as advertising (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAzrgbu8gEMIIK3r4Se1d...). Their inventory is a curated list of high quality products. Their web reviews are all from people in the same tribe of hot sauce fans. Their website and shipping practices are all _good enough_.
What makes it work? I see the web content, but driving web content to Amazon would make the site pointless. It seems like Amazon's prices are higher, though. Is it direct sales?
why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online
Easy answer: because they'll walk out with the book they were going to buy and the book next to it. We used to have second-hand bookstores that would send you catalogs that you would peruse (by subscription, you'd actually pay for the catalog), and you could order from that. It was worth the money, no recommendation engine comes close to browsing a well-curated store.
I take issue with those sections too; you completely ignored that often customers won't know exactly what they want, importance of browsing, and the expert service provided that is the salesperson giving book suggestions and advice to customers.
Your points about alternative revenue streams by providing alternative services are directly covered in 20 year old tv show (black books) where a 'dysfunctional' bookstore either has them already implemented or trials them. For example, coffee is about keeping the customers in the store and browsing, people leave if they get hungry or thirsty. If you're actually deriving substantial profit from your hot drinks, then you're running a niche cafe, and you're in competition against legitimate baristas with fancier machines. It also takes up a large amount of space, and can cause volume issues otherwise.
Most secondhand bookstores are small, and items have a large volume-time footprint i.e. the turnover of any individual item is low. Get rid of all the low margin books for dining, and you ruin the browsing experience in multiple ways. You're just suggesting the secondhand bookstore should ditch it's secondhand books, and instead sell only high turnover popular stuff i.e. compete with modern normal bookstores, which are already doing beyond what you've suggested.
> you can use it as an opportunity to remove inventory that wasn't selling anyway
If you don't have a database of your inventory, you don't know what's selling and what's not, apart from hazy memories of employees and the amount of dust on the shelf.
When we do inventory of books, about 7000 of them, it takes a team of 3 or 4 people scanning labels on the back of books, about 5 hours to scan them all. Add 3 or 4 more people in to watch the computer(s) for errors as scans come in. Then add an hour or two to pur things back to normal.
For a used bookstore with no pre made labels and books stacked and crammed I’d double the time. Then add some more for books that don’t have a barcode on them...
This is with laser barcode scanners and dedicated machines per device. Phone scanners are much slower.. either way, give me a crew of people, scanners, etc and we could scan about 10K books a day.
For a used bookstore inventory could be done once a year like we do to avoid drift in our data.. but more realistically everything would be scanned as it comes in and out. Why that doesn’t already happen baffles me too!
> If you assume 15 seconds per book at pace, 40 books per shelf, 6 shelves per bookcase, and 30 bookcases in the average store,
Everyone else commenting on the math, but I take issue with the starting assumptions. A bookshelf fits approximately 10 books per foot. A used bookstore, in my experience, tends to have a huge amount of books - shelves to the ceiling (8 shelves high, 5 feet wide). Taking as an example some used bookstores near me, I would estimate a used book store at minimum would have 100 such shelves. 8x5x10=400 books per shelf, x100 = 40000 books. Using your scan time estimate, that gives us 40000x0.25min = 10000 minutes, or 166 hours to scan the isbn (21 days)
Edit: Responding comment is quite right, original calculation mistaken. It's 4AM here. 40 × 6 × 30 = 7200 books × 15 seconds ÷ 60 ÷ 60 = 30 hours, so <4 days assuming 8 hour days. Or 1 day if you can speed up to 5 seconds per book.