Internet Has Become a Boon for Book-Lovers

When my dearest friend, Maureen, was a child, her favorite book was “Bright April” by a Philadelphia writer named Marguerite de Angeli. It was about a little Acadian girl, and in one of our far-ranging phone conversations, Maureen recalled that her father-in-law had cavalierly given the book away, and she had never seen it again.

One of our many shared pleasures is buying each other marvelous presents that no one else understands. So for Maureen’s birthday that year, she received an only slightly battered copy of “Bright April” that I had found on the Internet. I know how much she liked it: When she thanked me, she cried.

Latter-day Luddites claimed the Internet would kill the book, but, in fact, it is selling more books than ever. And not just new books. The Internet has revolutionized the selling of rare and used books as well.

Consider the experience of a friend and former Valleyite who used to haunt the local secondhand bookstores. He carried a little notebook filled with titles he lusted after (a rare first edition of Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” among others). He even had a special pair of glasses made that were just the right strength for reading the titles of books two or three shelves up.

Then, a couple of years ago, he learned at an antiquarian book fair about www.bibliofind.com. The Web site (recently acquired by Amazon.com) claims to have an inventory of 9 million rare and used books. He quickly added it to his book-buying itinerary, along with www.abebooks.com (abe stands for advanced book exchange), a Canadian Web site that boasts it is the world’s largest source of out-of-print books, with 12 million titles. Both sites sell the stock of booksellers who pay the Internet companies to list their books.

My bibliophilic pal still never met a bookstore he didn’t like, but he now regularly cruises the Internet for potential treasures as well. Instead of being limited to bookstores he can visit in person, he can now peruse the digital shelves of shops as far away as Australia.

The search for rare books was once almost entirely serendipitous. I remember looking unsuccessfully for 20 years for a copy of Peter Viertel’s fictionalized account of the making of “The African Queen,” called “White Hunter, Black Heart.” It was finally reissued in paperback when Clint Eastwood made it into a movie in 1990.

The Internet has made delayed literary gratification a thing of the past. My friend had searched bookstores assiduously since 1963 for a controversial history book called “Slavery” by Stanley Elkin. He recently found several copies listed on the Internet and snapped up a long-sought first edition for $20.

“The great trade-off is you can find just about anything on the Internet,” he says. “The only drawback is you lose some of the thrill of the hunt.”

The Internet has also changed the way bookstores do business. Bargain Books on Friar Street, around the corner from the Van Nuys Courthouse, is a magnet for literate people on jury duty. Its main store and several annexes contain some 250,000 volumes, according to Diane Sharrar, who owns the shop with brother Bill Wirt.

“It’s taken us two years to get 1,600 books on line,” says Sharrar, who has sold about 700 of them. She figures she spends about an hour a day at the computer adding new titles and deleting those that have already been sold.

So far, Internet sales are a minuscule part of their business, she says. But they have had some success selling books that Valleyites showed no interest in.

“We had a couple of copies of ‘Advanced Chinese,’ ” she recalls. “We had them for three years and no nibbles.” She listed them on the Internet and not only sold the two that had been gathering dust in the shop, but a third that she bought to resell.

She had similar luck with a dozen Doc Savage paperbacks. They had been priced at under $100 in the store, but no sale.

“Some people had it on line as high as $200. I put it on for $100-something, and it sold immediately.”

The Internet allows customers to comparison shop online, which is “a double-edged sword,” in Sharrar’s view. The customer who used to buy a book on the spot may now check out the electronic competition before making a purchase.

“I see my customers writing things down,” Sharrar says. “No matter how much goodwill you build up with your customers, they still want to buy at the best possible price.”

Heritage Book Shop in West Hollywood is to antiquarian books what Faberge is to eggs.

Locally, it is the place to go if you want, say, a first printing of “The Great Gatsby,” the one with the error on page 205 (“sick in tired,” instead of “sick and tired”). The one with the oh-so-elusive, must-have-first-state dust jacket--the one with the big J on the back--in perfect condition. If Heritage had one, which, at the moment, it does not, the book would sell for about $40,000, says owner Louis Weinstein.

According to Weinstein, the Internet allows the shop to reach far more people than its local customers, as well as the 7,000 or 8,000 people who used to receive its quarterly catalogs, which the new technology has made obsolete.

The Internet, he says, “is a way to have people introduced to book collecting who don’t have an antiquarian book shop within driving distance.”

Heritage sells books for as much as $100,000. Its Internet titles are mostly in the $200 to $1,500 range--the shop’s low end. Weinstein estimates that half its sales are now coming from the Internet, but that they account for less than 5% of its gross.

In the past couple of years, Weinstein has noticed, more people are buying from Heritage, but fewer people are actually coming into the handsome shop.

In Weinstein’s view, and that of everyone who worships words and Gutenberg, the voluptuous pleasure of cradling a rare and beautiful book is something you just can’t download.

“Browsing,” Weinstein says, “is still part of the joy.”

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Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.