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Originally Posted by kindlekitten
is there any way of tracking that? outside of rare books, who would be keeping an inventory of sales of used books? I have an outstanding little used bookstore here where I live, the most organized, easy to use and helpful used bookstore I've ever been in. I seriously doubt they keep a record of all of the titles they sell. whenever I have asked for something, they have had to physically go and look as opposed to using any kind of a database. I know that they put stuff that they consider collectible into some kind of a record as they do a certain amount of online selling of rare books, but they don't track the average stuff
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Actually our town's biggest and best stocked used bookstore has everything in a database. There does exist (Even Used & Rare) Bookstore Management applications. A lot of stores do not use it though because of the overhead involved to catalog all books already in the store as well as new books as they come in...but once everything is up to date, it's pretty fast. They can even use a bar-code scanner on newer books.
As for actually tracking the sales and such, I doubt it is possible at all. Anything would be pure guesstimation. But I will say, both publishers and new-book retail sellers want to do anything possible to drive used book stores out of business.
Makes me remember there is/was (I dunno if it is even still in business) but in San Luis Obispo, California, there was one of the best used book stores I have ever been in...wood floors with each flooring strip creaking from each step taken through the store...and that odor of a clean but used bookstore...a shame I don't get up there anymore...it might be closed down by now though, the property is just too valuable, even in today's economy.