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| SHEILA MASSON/ADVANCE Peter McMillan is closing his used bookstore, The Odyssey Bookshop on Grant Avenue, because business has dropped off due to competition from the Internet. |
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July 1st, 2009
Odyssey Bookshop shutting its doors
By Paul Jones
Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 4:07 PM PDT
According to Peter McMillan of The Odyssey Bookshop on Grant Avenue, his private used bookstore is the only one between San Rafael and Petaluma. Soon, however, there won’t be a single one. Because The Odyssey Bookshop is going out of business by December.
“My regular customers are upset, but they understand,” said McMillan, who says the Internet is likely to blame for the “precipitous” decline in business for booksellers all over. “Recently, business has gone down every year.”
If you can’t beat them, join them. McMillan said he was planning on doing business through the Internet himself once he’d moved out of his current location.
“I’ll sell books on (used book) search engines, but I’ll also have my own Web site too,” he said. “I don’t know a lot about selling online, because I haven’t done too much of it.”
According to McMillan, the bookstore is the victim of a larger market shift affecting even larger retailers.
“I don’t hear anything good about Borders or Waldenbooks either,” he said. “They’re not making any profit at all. … You can buy new books for insane prices on Amazon.com.”
Changes in the book-publishing industry and retail market drove McMillan out of business once before.
“(In 1979) I moved to Novato and I bought a new bookstore here in town. It was called “Amber Griffin,” he said, pointing to a stained-glass frame depicting the eponymous amber-colored creature, a souvenir from the earlier venture. “It was over where they’re building Whole Foods, now … then I moved it to this location, coincidentally enough. I closed that store in 1985. I could see the writing on the wall for independent new bookstores.”
Ironically, after returning to the same location he’d moved out of in ’85, it was McMillan’s turn to benefit at the expense of corporate hubris. Novato’s Crown Books location shut down barely before he moved in.
“I opened up this store in June of 2001,” he said. “Crown Books closed about two months before.”
While the Novato location had turned a profit, the parent company had failed to remain solvent.
“(Crown Books) did quite well here,” said McMillan. “I think Novato misses it … But the corporation got top-heavy.”
McMillan said he even bought the closed franchise’s old shelves.
“They were trying to sell everything,” he said.
But filling gap proved a struggle. While start-up business was good, McMillan said he saw a permanent decline following the economic slowdown following the Sept. 11, attack in 2001.
“It never recovered, not really,” he said. “I think it was four or five years until I had an August like the August before 9-11.”
Finally, McMillan said he realized he couldn’t afford to stay in business.
“I’ll sell online. It’s basically all that’s left for guys that have been in the business a long time like myself,” he said.
That business is one with the potential to unearth real treasures. While the market for new books has exploded into a bottoming-out discount price-war, antique books are a stable, valuable market pursuit.
“There’s people who buy used books because they’re cheaper … and there’s people who collect books,” he said. “Most of my regular customers don’t live in Novato, they live in Petaluma, San Rafael, Mill Valley, and the East Bay. I have a lot of dealers who shop here.”
McMillan said he didn’t feel comfortable dealing in valuable books, but said older editions could be worth the effort to find and sell them.
“I had a book I was selling or a friend, and I had it online for two and half years at $5,500, and no one even inquired. Then Pacific Book Auction said they were having a sale … and it sold for $15,000 dollars.”
While Odyssey’s used books will be available for the curious, nostalgic and entrepreneurial over the World Wide Web, Novatans asking for a new bookstore may still have a long wait ahead of them. McMillan said he didn’t know anything about Book Passage’s speculative interest in opening up a location by Whole Foods, a plan that seems to have stalled over the past year.
“There have been a number of people coming in here drooling through the ears asking me when I’m going out of business so they can have my space. I don’t know what will go in here once I’m gone,” he said. “There were a couple of people here from Book Passage once … (but) I don’t know if they were just scouting around.”
Contact Paul Jones at pjones@novatoadvance.com.
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Orleana wrote on Oct 22, 2007 1:24 PM: