Bookstore embraces, bucks Web

Like a lot of book lovers, Carrie Jenott had a dream of one day opening her own bookstore.

In her vision it would have wood floors. Cushy chairs for readers. A side room for authors to entertain the crowds.

But then along came the Internet. Against that force, who in their right mind would try it the old-fashioned way, with a walk-in storefront and actual books stocked on actual shelves?

"So I got this warehouse instead," Carrie laughed, a fork lift beeping by. "Not very romantic, is it?"

We were standing in a distribution storehouse in the warren of corporate parks that covers the Kent valley. It's the headquarters of Once Sold Tales, an online used-book website that Carrie and her husband, Eric, took over in 2004.

They started out in their basement. Today they have four warehouses in Auburn and Kent, staffed by 25 employees and crammed with nearly 400,000 used titles to be sold, via the Web, all over the world.

The business is driven by a software program Eric wrote that assesses the online book market and re-prices their entire inventory every 24 hours to make sure it's the lowest-priced anywhere. Some of the more expensive books are re-priced every 20 minutes.

"Used books are now completely commoditized," Eric says. "You have to price your books below all competitors, constantly, or they won't sell."

But the reason I'm here is that there was a strange twist on the way to the Web revolution. The books somehow got left behind.

It turns out that in the ruthlessly efficient, instantly updateable Web market, countless books are no longer worth selling, because it costs far more to ship them than the market judges they are worth.

"Book prices are so low they're becoming a disposable product," Eric says.

Take "The Trumpet of the Swan," E.B. White's classic about a voiceless swan who learns to speak by playing a stolen trumpet. What's it worth, used, on the Web right now?

Only one cent, believe it or not. Plus $3.99 to mail it to you.

There are tens of thousands of orphaned books like this down in the Kent warehouses. Once they would have been sold in a used-book store, the price set mostly by guesswork. Now the Web can instantly tell the supply and the demand. And which books are considered worthless. Destined for the pulp recycling plant.

Once Sold Tales collects 220,000 used books a month. It now destroys, on average, 150,000 of them.

Unless ... the owners thought. What if they unplugged?

On Monday, Once Sold Tales opened an old-fashioned walk-in bookstore, in the front of the company's main warehouse (the website business remains.) It's stocked with their orphaned books, the ones destined for the pulp factory.

The price, for all books, is $1 a pound.

No shipping costs, but you gotta get there in person. And by "there," I mean in the middle of warehouse nowhere — 22442 72nd Ave. S. in Kent.

Shoppers Tuesday said it was a find. Nancy McKeever, of Enumclaw, snapped up a hardback of Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic & Sister." It weighed 1.15 pounds.

"You can't find that at a thrift store for a dollar fifteen, no way," McKeever beamed. "To me this is a book hunter's paradise."

A man left the warehouse with a chin-high stack, tipping the scales at 3.1 pounds. He pronounced it a "freakin' deal."

I decided to "rescue" — as Carrie called it — "The Trumpet of the Swan." A paperback, it weighed less than 6 ounces. It was mine for 36 cents.

Of course it's crazy to open a physical store, especially one that sells books for 36 cents. It's doubly crazy, Carrie Jenott says, that it's the Internet — the beast that's supposedly killing the brick-and-mortar stores — that compelled her to go back to the future.

She sure was smiling, though.

It may not have wood floors or cozy chairs or author readings. But she's finally got her bookstore.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.