Building a better brain

Well, it's been over a week since my last post and I actually feel pretty good about the progress we've made since then. Shaun & I've tweaked several things on the site (all of them minor to the eye of the beholder, but to us they're huge); a cleaner link for this blog; we've started listing our used books on Biblio.com; and I've fixed a couple of our reviews in the Prescience section.

I also added information about hunting down out-of-print books for people; which is something my current employer (or most bookstores) don't do, with the internet being so accessible and whatnot. But sometimes the action for used books happens off of the web; in the goodwills, the estate sales, the library sales... We're envisioning a want list, basically, so that when we do go to these events and gatherings we can whip out the list and get it. We love catering to that completist obsession; we know, each of us is obsessed about collecting all of a particular thing. So we can sympathize. Also, it's the addiction to the noise people make when you tell them you have that book that they've been searching for for years....

The used books are a temporary thing; we want to sell new books, but there are several stages to completing that goal (all of which we've just started); bank loan, physical space, agreements with the distributors (and in time) directly with the publishers.

We have to establish good credit and to do that we have to start with the distributors (Ingram, Baker & Taylor) and then after a couple of months we can approach the publishers.

Our physical location depends on serendipity; the timing of the loan with the availability of a space in the neighborhoods we're interested in (Ballard and Greenwood). The primary reason for both those areas is that they are almost equi-distant from my current employer and the University Bookstore; we know it would be foolish to step near their territories (even though Steve and I helped build the SF section at the former). Also, the areas aren't so crazy with the real estate hikes going on in the other two. For now, so we know we have to act soon.