Twice-Sold Tales

"The equation was to go bigger," Roberts says. So he did.

In 1997, Wonder Book had no warehouse. In 2002, after outgrowing a couple of warehouse locations, Roberts found himself on Frederick's Monocacy Boulevard, checking out something like 180,000 square feet of empty space. "You could look down and see forever," he says.

He couldn't afford it all, but he signed a lease for 54,000 square feet. No one believed (bets were made, Kline says) that he could fill it as fast as he did.

Six years later, the euphoria has faded some.

Wonder is privately held, and Roberts won't disclose annual sales figures, for competitive reasons. But he notes that, while Wonder's gross from Internet sales has more than doubled since 2005, prices have dropped sharply at the same time.

"The competition's everywhere," he says. It's everything from people selling out of their basements and garages to big operators, even more factory-like than Wonder, who sell books for pennies and squeeze most of their profits out of the shipping and handling charges.

"All of a sudden we're going: 'What's happening?' The graph is going like this." His arm forms a negative slope again.

This is where those constant rethinkings come in.

To stay profitable, Wonder has converted to bulk mailing, found lighter packing material and re-engineered work stations. More importantly, Roberts has invested heavily in better, faster software, using the beefed-up computing power to adjust prices whenever competitors start eating too much into sales.

One result: fewer judgments to make at the sorting table. Many books now go straight to data-entry stations, where a quick scan of their International Standard Book Numbers will reveal whether there are too many copies online already, at too low a price, to make dealing with them worthwhile.

Kline, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s who could pass for a grad student in philosophy, is Wonder's software guru. "He knows computers like you or I can drive a car," says Roberts. It's Kline's job to tweak prices as Wonder's revenues rise and fall, managing an automated decision-making process he says involves 25 or 30 steps.

It's a long way from one guy building shelves and pricing books on his own. And the psychological adjustment in how Wonder has to see its business -- moving from book-think to widget-think, essentially -- hasn't been easy.

"It's looking at them as pieces of data," Kline says, "as opposed to saying okay, this is a book."

"I mean, we're selling them for as low as 50 cents now, which a few years ago I never would have dreamed," Roberts says. "It's pure supply and demand."

The Decline of the Book

Well, most of the time. It's hard to argue that the 120,000 Russian books Roberts acquired a couple of years ago represent a supply-and-demand calculation.

The short version of an epic tale: Viktor Kamkin Inc., a Russian bookstore in Rockville, went out of business in dramatic fashion that involved eviction and books being shoveled into dumpsters with a front-end loader. Someone eventually got in touch with Roberts, who agreed to haul away what was left.

He paid almost nothing -- but no price is low enough for books you can't sell. Most now sit in rented trailers in the warehouse parking lot. When Roberts sought advice from antiquarian booksellers, he says, "one of the guys e-mailed back and said: 'Pour gas on them, light a match, run.' "

He won't do it. "I'm thinking we'll find the right Russian someday," he says hopefully.

But the reality is that Wonder Book, like the rest of the book business, faces far tougher questions than how to dispose of a few trailers filled with Cyrillic texts.

There's the supply question:

Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader and applications created for cellphones seem likely to push early adopters away from physical books at increasing rates. Publishers have been scrambling to prepare for the brave new world of e-books, and a 54,000-square-foot warehouse, needless to say, won't count as a major asset in that world.

There's the demand question:

Talk to enough publishers and booksellers and you'll find that their No. 1 long-term worry is the increasing competition for their customers' time and attention.

"I think brains are getting rewired," says Kline, who admits to reading less himself. In an online, instant-gratification world, "watching a movie or reading a book is an event now" and not, as it once was, "the basic form of entertainment."

The good news? There are still plenty of books and buyers out there, and used books offer attractive value in a recession.

"We tend to do okay during tough times," Roberts says. Besides, "I can't see reading off a Kindle in the bathtub or at the beach."

Is he still optimistic, then, about the business that's filled his warehouse -- the business he's spent a lifetime building?

"Oh, in the near future, yeah," Roberts says.

"Ten years at least."