The Future of Collecting

Day 4.  Our interview with AJ Kohn of the Used Book Blog and Vizu continues. As former marketing director for Alibris, he comments on the future of collecting.

FB&C: I've said that we may well look back on the 2000s (meaning the decade) as a golden age of book collecting. Never before was so much available to so many. Most collectors I know started spending more when the Internet came along - they were previously limited by availability and when books went online they bought and bought. Do you think that's going to continue?

AJ: I agree that the Internet really opened up the door for collectors. Suddenly they had access to a far larger selection. I'm not saying that rare books don't exist, but it becomes much easier to find books when you're aggregating from so many sellers. Some of these sellers know what they have and price appropriately, but I think many collectors enjoy stalking their prey - waiting for a less savvy bookseller, or casual seller, to place something on the market without knowing what they've got. We certainly saw something akin to that behavior at Alibris, searching through pages and pages and pages of listings looking for the hidden gem.

There's still more out there though. Plenty of booksellers remain offline for various reasons and attics are full of wonderful finds. So, I see the Internet as just one more place in a collector's route as they look for a particular book. It may be the first stop, and it might be a very efficient stop, but it won't be the only stop.

The flip side to this is that there are more collectors out there. The Internet is introducing collecting to a new audience or simply making it easier for edge collectors to really join the mainstream. So, over time there will be more collectors and the supply and demand curve will change. You may have been the only one looking for a signed first edition of Matt Ruff's Fool On A Hill a few years ago, now ... there could be a small flock keeping an eye out for that particular item.

I personally have a small collection, and I likely wouldn't have done so without the Internet. Not that I didn't want to - but it made it easier to find a signed David Mitchell or Christopher Moore. And even authors seem to be turning into collectors. Jasper Fforde's bookstack is a testament to this.

I see a bright future for collecting, with a much wider audience with new niches to fill and passions to explore.