I volunteer at my local College Women’s Club Booksale where we accept donated material most of the year and then sell it twice a year. The money goes to scholarships for local girls. Ours is one of the oldest and largest such sales in the Northeast. We are the rock bottom of the used book and media market. I find comparing what I see there with what I read about current conditions for new books and media to be a fascinating game.

We usually start to see the best sellers, both fiction and non-fiction, a year or so after they come out, and are flooded with them over the next several years. Not surprisingly, all of our donations lag trends by several years while our sales tend to reflect current trends. Before my time, Westerns were a large category. Now they are down to a couple of shelves. Hard cover fiction doesn’t sell as well as it used to, and we can now sell trade size paper backs, in good condition, for the same price as regular hardcovers ($1) and often more. The hard cover fiction section is shrinking, but mystery/thrillers is growing. The public donates far more self-help/medical/family books than they will buy. Poetry is surpringly, at least to me, popular and we rarely have much left after our second sale. I’m still waiting to see when we’ll start to get more than a few Manga books. It should be happening any year now. There’s no big surprises about any of this. What I really want to write about are video tapes and CDs.

Five years ago, we were getting a modest number of video tapes, maybe 200 or so. They easily fit onto 3 shelves for display. The numbers grew slowly for several years and we’ve been gradually expanding their display space. By 2006 we were getting enough that we started selling them in both our sales, where previously they were for sale only once a year. But over this summer they suddenly started pouring in. We have most of 2 bookcases full and have stored 14 boxes (the kind that hold reams of paper). We’ll be dropping the price from $1 each to 50 cents. Given the shift over to DVDs, it’s not at all surprising that we’ve seen so many video tapes coming in. What has really surprised me is the suddenness with which we’ve been innundated. I shudder to think what will happen next year.

Five years ago we didn’t get any DVDs. Over the last several years we’ve been getting gradually more and more of them. Where we might have had a dozen 3 years ago, we probably have well over a hundred this year. I’ll be curious to see how quickly folks switch to video on demand and become comfortable enough with it to give away their DVD collections. That will be the point at which we start receiving them in massive quantities.

We accept and sell vinyl records and people have been donating their collections for years. No particular change there. We’re seeing fewer audio tapes, although we still get plenty. But the CDs have mirrored the video tapes. Five years ago we had a modest number, and the volume has increased steadily ever since. Last year we dropped the price from $2 to $1. Now this year we are suddenly overwhelmed with them. We’ve had people bringing us their entire CD collections, boxes and bags at a time. This is the first year that we’ve had so many that we feel obliged to sort them out into categories as we do with the records. Previously, if they were sorted at all, it was only into classical music and non-classical music categories.

We all know about the shift from video tapes to DVDs and the trend toward keeping music on computers and buying it online. So none of this is really surprising. But in thinking about what I’m seeing at the Booksale, I’d say that at least some folks are now far enough along in those trends to finally be willing to give up collections. It looks to me as if, at least in my fairly affluent part of Northern New Jersey, there are increasingly more households who have completed their shift to DVDs and are now ready to get rid of all those old videos which “aren’t worth much”. I expect that we’ll see the same huge numbers of video tapes for quite a few years to come, just as we still get vinyl records. Folks have been slower to donate their CDs, but just this year I think we’ve hit the tipping point there as well. Next year will show whether that’s the case, but I’m quite confident in my prediction that we’ll have even more CDs to deal with then.

If what I hear the pundits say is correct, and people move away from DVDs to video on demand, netflix, etc. then eventually the Booksale should start getting a flood of DVDs. But that hasn’t happened yet. I think we’re still getting duplicates, the I-didn’t-like-that-movie, etc. rather than full collections. Which suggests that DVD collections still have some perceived value. I’m quite curious to see how long it takes for the trend to take hold. When material floods in, and demand is slowing enough that we have to lower the price, that will indicate that the trend is mature.

Posted: 11|3|08 at 3:02 pm. Filed under: Bookstores, Miscellaneous, Retailing, Video Content. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Pinging is currently disabled.