Twice-Sold Tales

Are we talking obsessive book lover with clutter issues here? Or savvy businessman with a counterintuitive, buy-everything/sell-everything strategy?

Whatever the explanation, it produces interesting side effects. There are 16 bookcases in the warehouse men's room, crammed with books for sale by the foot.

The Online Revolution

The Wild West came to Wonder Book in November 1997, in the unlikely form of a book called "History and Development of Holstein Cattle in Frederick County, Maryland 1922-1964." It was the first book Wonder sold online, and it went for something like $45, if Roberts's sometimes hazy memory can be trusted, to a customer in Hereford, England.

Frederick dairy cattle!

England!

His brother in San Francisco had been telling him he should be online, Roberts says, and a young Wonder employee named Clark Kline had been bugging him about it, too. So they'd tried listing a few titles through AbeBooks and got what Roberts calls "a wake-up call."

They put more books online. The books kept selling.

"And then all of a sudden the retail sales were going like this and the online sales were going like this," Roberts says, graphing the downward and upward trends with his arms. "So we put more resources into what we saw was going to be the future of bookselling."

They weren't the only ones.

Powell's Books, the innovative Portland, Ore., store that sells both new and used titles, started experimenting online in 1994. In 1998, says director of marketing and development Dave Weich, Web sales represented less than 1 1/2 percent of Powell's corporate revenue. By 2001, that number was 30 percent.

As more buyers and sellers discovered the Web, the kind of used books being sold -- mostly collectibles at first -- broadened to include just about everything. "Gradually is not the right word," says Alibris founder Richard Weatherford, describing this shift. "It became a flood, very quickly."

Amazon started selling used books in 2000, infuriating publishers, who hated the fact that the online behemoth listed new and used copies together. But for companies like Wonder, listing with Amazon meant reaching vastly more potential customers.