SIX CRISES AND A CHALLENGE a short meditation on the state of online bookselling 2003
Stephen Windwalker is the author of Selling Used Books Online: The Complete Guide to Bookselling at Amazon’s Marketplace & Other Online Sites, which is available in paperback and in a Kindle Book edition.
This more recent article first appeared in the newsletter of the Independent Online Bookseller’s Association (IOBA) in 2003. It focuses on six major problems that vexed online booksellers then and continue to pre-occupy them in 2007:
* the market glut of sellers and available copies;
* artificially low pricing or lowballing;
* the inconsistency of professional standards and ethics among online sellers;
* a wide range of perceived threats related to the Amazon business model;
* selling venue glitches, conspiracies, and performance issues; and
* the coming shakeout.
