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How Does the Second-Hand Book Business Really Work? with WeBuyBooks Co-Founder Mike Lane
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Mike Lane, managing director and co founder of We Buy Books about the economics of the secondhand book business. We Buy books as one of the UK's largest secondhand book dealers. Before I started at New Books Network, I had a brief yet failed stint as a rare book dealer. I always been fascinated by the secondhand and rare book world. As a teenager I used to go into secondhand bookstores and I would browse shelves for hours. I literally, I don't think I would be working at New Books Network and working in the book world if it wasn't for this incredible experience as a young kid. And I've always wondered how secondhand bookstores stay in business. I've always wondered what happens to the books that I go and sell at used bookstores. And of course I've always been fascinated by the rare book industry as well. You know, why do certain books attain ridiculous value and others go away in value? So Mike, I just wanted to invite you onto the program and get a chance to talk to you about it because you're, you're probably one of the world's leading experts on this industry and I was wondering if you just tell us a little bit at first about yourself and how you got involved in the book business.
- [01:20]
A
Well, I'm actually a civil engineer, believe it or not. I trained in civil and structural engineering at the University of Bradford and for the first 20 years of my career I worked in civil engineering companies, ending up as managing director of a company that maintained the UK power networks. But unfortunately my stint as managing director of that company came to an end and I found myself at a loose end. My partner was going to charity shops, thrift shops you'd call them in the usa, buying books cheaply and selling them online. And I'd always wanted to add a little bit of entrepreneurial streak in me and I thought there's something in this. And so I joined and got involved in the business. That was 20 years ago. Today we have a 25 million pound a year business based in a place called Rosendale, lancashire in England, UK. And we sell about 10,000 books a day all over the world. We have annual sales of about £25 million and we employ around about 130 people. So did I expect it to turn into that? Maybe it did. I always had a vision that it could become something. Just a few of the statistics, we have around about 2 million books in our Warehouse. Our warehouse is a former cotton mill built in 1840. It has five stories. It takes some maintaining but it's perfect for shelves and shelves and shelves.
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B
Yeah, it's a. That's. The scale is remarkable. Two million books in a five story warehouse. That must be, I mean I would love to walk through that warehouse and pick through it.
- [03:41]
A
The interesting thing, it's not like a secondhand bookshop where all history books are together, all the wall books are together, all the beekeeping books are together, etc. Because the way they come into us, they come in totally randomly and so we had to assign a location and each book has a location number. And so they're just put in out in order on those shelves and the order they come in. So you couldn't come into our warehouse and say ah, I want to go and look at all the books on the first World War and that there are floor three, aisle four. Da da da. It's not like that. What you'd need to do is you'd need to go into the computer and type in the category and it would show all the locations of all those books all over the warehouse. So it's just because it has to be automated and systemized. It's not like the old second hand bookshops. So we don't catalog them like that.
- [04:40]
B
You also store CDs and DVDs?
- [04:43]
A
Yeah, it's, you know, we were buying CDs and DVDs, they're less commonly used. People download movies. You know. I actually found myself last year sitting at home thinking I would like to watch that film again. I'm thinking I do have the DVD somewhere. But I was that lazy to go and try and find it. I ended up paying £1 50 and downloading it again. She was just it. There's not the demand for those sort of things anymore. So if we do have CDs and DVDs they'd be more specialists, special interest, more rare movies, more rare music. It might be the, the 1973 recording of the Birmingham of Birmingham Philharmonic doing Beethoven's 9th particular here. That could have a particular value because it was superbly done or something like that. Or it could be a, a specialist, more niche horror type film or something like that. But your day to day films, your, your die hards and all that sort of stuff. No, they have no value. There's a bit of a trend on some of the music side with some of the lyrics changing on songs on the more recent downloads to let's put it this way, that Fit the political culture. And some people want the original lyrics, so they will go out and buy the original CD rather than the latest download. So there's a bit of a trend there, but not huge.
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B
I think a lot of people that are listening have probably had the experience of having way too many books in their house. I try and adopt one book in, one book out rule because otherwise it just will. I won't be able to walk through my apartment. And I live in New York City where there's lots of places where you can go and sell books.
- [06:51]
A
And.
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B
And I'll usually wait till I have a. I start stacking books, and I'll have a stack of maybe 20 or 30 books, and I'll go to the used bookstore and I'll start handing them the books. And I'm always like, why some? They take some books and they price them. I'm like, wow, $15 for that book. I didn't expect that. And then other books, they're like, you know, take this away. We don't need this here. And I'm wondering, you know, obviously people are selling. Tons of people are selling books to you. How do you decide which books to buy and how do you price them?
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A
Ah, okay. So what's that huge bookstore in New York, the massive new one?
- [07:26]
B
Oh, the Strand.
- [07:27]
A
Yes, yes. Do you go there to sell?
- [07:29]
B
Yes, that's the. I. I oftentimes will say the Strand has. Has, you know, and I. And I normally will sell it for store credit as opposed to. As opposed to cash, because they give good store credit. You get a lot more value. And I'm gonna buy books anyways. Might as well.
- [07:46]
A
Well, yeah, absolutely. So how. How do we. So it all goes Back to page 1 of the Economic textbook. So it's supply, demand, price graph. So if there's a large demand for a book, lots of people want it, and there aren't many copies of that. About the price will be high and you'll get more for that book. So if there's a low demand for that book, John Grisham's latest novel, a year after it was published, everyone who wants to read it's read it. There's millions of copies floating around nobody wants, so I'm afraid they end up in landfill. So how do we tell what the supply and the demand is? That's one of the clever parts of online selling. In the old days, it used to be the knowledge and the instinct of that secondhand bookshop owner. He'd know what sells or she'd know what sells and what doesn't and how much they sell stuff for it was just down to their knowledge. Now it's data driven. You know, 50% of all books sold are sold on Amazon in the uk and I'm guessing it's similar in the, in the us they've got a virtual monopoly. But one thing they do do is they do give data out as to the popularity of each title. So if you're on the Amazon page and you're looking at a particular book, just scroll down and you'll end up with a sales rank. And every item on Amazon has a sales rank. But it's very useful for books. So a book with a sales rank of 1 is the most popular, fastest selling book on Amazon. A book with a sales rank of 3 million, just a handful might sell every year, and then in between, it's not a straight line, it's a sort of logarithmic curve. You can get a pretty good idea from looking at that information, the sales rank, about what the demand for that book is, how popular that book is. The other part of the basic economic textbook, page one, which is the supply again, you can get that information from Amazon by looking at how many people are selling that item. So if there's 3, 3, 3 for sale, that's pretty low. If there's 300 for sale, that's pretty high. And so you, using those factors, you get a pretty good idea about what sort of price you can offer for that book with your margins to adults. So you pay your overheads and make a return on it. So that's the mathematical side of it. There's also some clever tools out there. One called Keeper.com, that's K-E-E-P-A.com, which you can download a widget onto your Chrome. And every time you open Amazon, look at a particular book, you'll see a graph appearance inside the webpage and that will give you the historic sales rank and the historic offers and the historic price of that book going back maybe 10 years if the book's that old. So that's the other factor you've got to have a look at, which is, I call it the, in marketing terms, the product life cycle. So if you've got John Grisham's latest popular fiction paperback product, Life Cycle, from it being published to ending up in landfill as a secondhand copy, might be six months to nine months. So if we get one of those, it's get rid of it as quickly as we can before it becomes no value. If you have a book on let's say geography, plate tectonics. Now I did that plate tectonics and geography at school. I doubt the subject has moved, I'm sorry, to any geologists and all the rest of it, but a sort of high school level or, you know, whatever. I doubt plate tectonics has moved as a subject that much in the last 30 years. So you might find a book on plate tectonics. The standard books, the prices have maintained over years, so product life cycle of those sort of books is quite, quite long. Law books, the law changes all the time, particularly under the English law system where you got case law, etc. Etc. So a law textbook after a couple of years might be redundant, might be no use anymore. Some are very old. Law books might be of interest, but for a different reason, historical reasons. So a law textbook, if it's two or three years old, you might say actually, unless it's a very specialist area and the law doesn't move much, it might lose its value quite quickly. Same with medical books. You've got to be careful. No one wants a 10 year old medical book because it might kill someone. Who knows? So yes, the life cycle of that particular subject is also a factor because that affects your return on an investment, how quickly you can sell it, or the fact that the value may decrease from the second you buy it. So those are the factors we look at and we have various algorithms, etc. To help determine that. I suspect your secondhand bookshop will be using similar factors. They will probably be looking at the Amazon online price, the sales rank and how many are for sale factor in their own experience as well. And that's how they come up with how much they're prepared to pay you for your pile of books that you take in for your store credits.
- [14:13]
B
Yeah, it does seem to be the case. Like obviously there are the secondhand books, like you said, the, the John Grisham a year later that they're not going to buy. When I go to a secondhand bookstore, they oftentimes seem to be stocked with, you know, classics, philosophy books, great literature, you know, what you'll, you'll have your, you know, your David Copperfield. Those types of books are those sort, sorts of your, those types of books oftentimes your bread and butter. The kind of the classics that people, you know, continue to read but maybe they don't want to buy. The $30 new updated Penguin edition with the, you know, the new preface and everything.
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A
Yeah, you know, yeah, those classics, you know, I suspect the reason those sort of things keep selling is because they might be on the reading list at high school or college. And so you've constantly got people buying those if they weren't on the reading list. I do wonder. But yeah, but you know, a David Copperfield Penguin classic, it's cheap chip stuff. We're not selling those for an awful lot of money at all. So yeah, I wouldn't call those necessarily bread and butter. I think our bread and butter would be more books on hobbies, special interests, academic areas, et cetera. Like that. You know, if you said to me, what book don't you want? I don't really want huge popular fiction and I don't want children's books either. I like special interest, different individual books. That's what we tend to go for.
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B
Yeah. In my experience the books that seem to sell the best are university press and academic books like a year or two after they've come out because they don't have massive circulation. And oftentimes those books like are typically priced very high. So people are more interested in buying them for $10 as opposed to $110.
- [16:32]
A
It's. Yes. So in the UK, a very popular academic publisher might be Routledge or Oxford Press or those. So yes, premiums will be paid for books published by those publishers, depending on the book and the subject and the other factors I talked about earlier, a particularly interesting thing with some of the very valuable textbooks that you'll go to the university bookshop or you order and you'll gasp at the price, $80 or something like that and you're thinking, whoa. Now unfortunately some people have figured out that it's actually with modern day printing, digital printing, that there's quite a lot of counterfeit copies of some of these very expensive textbooks, mostly out of India. And Amazon were sued by publishers. I don't know who went to court or they settled, but there was certainly a bunch of publishers all got together and said, Amazon, you're facilitating the sale of these counterfeit books. And us being a seller on Amazon, we have to be very careful and check the books that come in that ones we're not reselling on Amazon are counterfeit copies. And so we as a business employer, full time counterfeit officer looking out and we train all our operatives to spot potential counterfeits. How do you do that? Well, often the quality of the printing is not quite right. Things won't be quite centered. The photographs, particularly if they use sort of photocopy techniques, won't be as good. And then if you have a suspicion about it, we know the proper published Weight of that book, we know the thickness, the length, the size. And then. So the counterfeiters don't quite use the same graded paper times 500 pages makes quite a bit of a difference to the weight of the item. So we're getting pretty good at spotting them now. But it's something to be wary of. And in the end, it's by faking a bucket's theft. And someone may get an $80 book for $10, but it's still theft, it's someone else's property and copyright, whoever the author is, et cetera. So that's something I think has cropped up in the last two or three years. We're very aware and taking a look out, making sure that we're. We're intercepting those as they come in.
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B
Yeah, I know that the counterfeiting of textbooks is a massive global problem and it is remarkable the lengths that certain people will go to to reproduce these books and the skill. It's almost absurd, but also, I think, expected in a way, given, given the cost of the textbooks and given the demand. There's always someone there to fill the
- [19:56]
A
n. Interestingly, it's not just the very expensive books. So you might have a very popular book that constantly sells, I don't know, the seven habits of, you know, successful people, whatever the book's called, you know, that is a constant seller. It's constantly in the top list and they'll go to the effort of counterfeiting those sort of books. And, you know, I could show you a pile of books that are meant to be the same one. Each one of them looks a slightly different thickness, size, et cetera, et cetera. So that's the other area that they're focusing on. So it's either the very continuously popular books or the very expensive ones. But, yeah, we need to keep an eye out for that.
- [20:52]
B
That makes sense. And an aspect of the secondhand book business is it seems like it's quite bifurcated from books that are cheaper than the list price of the. You know that when it first went on sale to books that are radically more expensive. These are the rare books. And I'm wondering how you deal with the rare books that come through versus the, you know, the cheaper, more affordable ones.
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A
So, yeah, we have two sources of books. One is if you're in the uk, you can go online or download our app and scan the barcode of the book and we'll say, beep. We'll pay you this much for it, or might be, sorry, we're not interested in that book at this time. So we don't tend to through that route, tend to get many rare or valuable books. But the other route is we do buy bulk collections of books by the lorry loads sometimes and they go down a sort of conveyor belt that scans the barcodes and if it fits our criteria, we'll keep it. Then there's a bunch of books that typically won't have a barcode, so they'll be looked at manually. And we have a team of people who are quite experienced, been doing this job a long time, who can spot the winners. They don't come around too often, but they do. We do get them. And what we will do with those, our specialist team will add those to the markets for sale. So might be to a books or even it might be to Amazon. But you know, you'll get not sort of a stock image, you'll get an actual image of what book looks like. Might be images of the publisher's page with the details, the dates and all the rest of it and more of a description. Or if it's particularly valuable, we will probably send it to one of the large auction houses. You have Malhams, Sotheby's, etc. And you know, the buyer then has the comfort of the auction house is standing by. That's the actual valuable book. I think we've sold books. We sold the second edition. Sorry, the second. Yeah, I suppose it's the second edition Beano album. The second Vino album was ever published for £5,000. We've had books, Harry Potter books, not worth as much as people, everyone thinks. But you know, this can be still quite valuable. We had a first edition in sign by the three actors in the movie that went for a few thousand pounds put through an auction house. We're not finding first edition James Bonds every day, but I think we've had a couple. But there were the later books which there were more printed. It's the early James Bond books where they were last printed in the first runs that are very valuable. So it's £10,000 then you've got books on. I think we had a book that came in and it was on Chinese structures and the book was about 100 years old and that sold to collectors in China. For some money. So. So yeah, we get a fair few through. But your day to day, what pays for the overheads of the business and all the rest of it is it's the day to day books with barcodes. The older book side, the antiquarian books is a nice to Have.
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It's the volume that pays the bills.
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It's the volume stuff that pays. Puts dinner on the table.
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Yeah, well, that was what I learned about the rare book industry, is that it's not very liquid and it's quite, you know, if the book is actually worth something, then it can take a lot of time to find the seller. And I feel like a lot of the successful antiquarian book dealers, they've been in the game for a very long time. They have a lot. They have a lot of rare books and, you know, they do it almost for the love of the game. It's a. A bit like being a museum curator as well.
- [25:41]
A
Yes, I think there's a definite element of that. But if they've been in the business a long time, they will have their particular expertise and areas that they are on the lookout for. And as a result of that, their network and list of contacts and collectors and all the rest of it is huge. So if it ends up in the right dealer, they can move it on pretty quickly. We're not that sort of business, hence us, we'll go to auction and that collector or that specialist, they'll buy it there and they'll know who exactly is interested in it and have the buyer lined up beforehand. Probably the way the used book market used to work before the Internet, you know, it was like that. Bob over there was a specialist in DH Lawrence, someone else over there was a specialist in this area or the other area. And if they got the books, they used to send them to each other. And so the prices were quite high. One thing the Internet has done is brought. Brought. That's good for the consumer, not so good for the book dealers, but it's brought the prices down of used books, so whereas before they were quite a bit higher. So some of the traditional booksellers don't like the Internet, but I can understand why.
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B
Yeah, you mentioned that you sell books on Amazon. I'm wondering where else you sell a lot of your books. Is it. Is it just through your website?
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A
So we don't actually currently have our own selling website. We buy. Have a buying website called webuybooks.co.uk. we will later this year be launching our own selling site. Why don't we have our own selling site? Was because every time you ask someone, well, where do you buy your books from? You get the. The a word answer, which is Amazon. And you know, so, yeah, it's very. They're very hard to compete with. As I said earlier, you know, 50% of book sales are on that one site. They do have a sort of quasi monopoly. But we go and sell on Amazon, we sell on ebay. There's a very good site called AbeBooks that quite a lot of your listeners will be aware of. But they may not be aware that Amazon actually own a books but a books are allowed to operate independently. So they're still a good place to find stuff. And if I'm buying books particularly something more specialist or different, I'd go to a books first. I think you more like to get the better deal.
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B
Yeah, I like looking at a books because they have a good list of the, you know, a lot of the, the rare books. See what the, how much certain rare books are going for on that site. It's you know, the secondhand book industry. It's obviously, you know, in general with the book industry. You know, it feel it fills a certain niche. I feel oftentimes like people that buy, go to secondhand bookstores or buy secondhand books tend to be like extremely voracious readers or you know, price sensitive readers. But oftentimes people that like to buy a lot of books might as well buy them secondhand. I'm curious if you know, anything that you've, that you've seen about the, you know, the kind of the consumers, their reading habits, things that have interested you, things that, about your, your, your customer base, you know, either people that sell to you or people that end up buying your books. Anything interesting that you've learned about those, those types of buyers?
- [29:52]
A
We probably know more about the people who sell to us than the people who buy from us because we're selling to third party websites, Amazon egg books, eBay, etc. And so technically they are a Amazon's customer or ebay's customer or a books customer and they don't like telling us about those customers, you know, so it's, I don't know huge amount I do know about the people who sell us their books and you know, why they sell us their books. So number one reason will be one, what a life event may have occurred and it may be death in the family house, clearance, divorce, dividing up the DVD into DVD collection and the book collection. Well sometimes the answer is just sell it all. Split the money. It's you know, it, it can be same marriage, children on the way, you've got to clear out the spare room or sadly it could be short of money, need money, let's see if we can sell some of the assets we've got. So they're the fundamental reasons there's People like you who are avid book readers and collectors, and you just run out of space. And so to buy the next book, you sell the, the, you go through the, the shelf and say, well, no, I don't really need. No, I'll keep that one. Yeah, I'll take that one. I like y. I know exactly the process you're going through. People have not got unlimited room. And yeah, the best way is to sell it either to, to your local bookshop or, or sell it online. And so in terms of the types of people who do that. So the motivations are those things, but the motivation is partly money. Another motivation will be just doing the right thing, finding a second life for that book, decluttering, decluttering the environment. All those are motivations. And novel them on their own is the motivation. It's. It's the cumulative effect of them. So who women more likely to sell the books than men? Or maybe it's the women selling the bar for the men. I don't know. But. And it will be more likely women in their 40s and 50s who sell the books. You know, that's, that's, that's the sort of demographic students will sell books, but not as much as you might think because they graduate in a particular subject, particularly engineering, like I did. I finished university and I've got my book on civil engineering materials. You think, well, I'm entering into a career in civil engineering. I better keep my books in case I need them. And then you realize 10 years later, you've never opened them once and wish you sold them 10 years previously. But it's a complicated array of reasons. So why do people buy secondhand books? I think it's value for money. You get it cheaper. It will be, I don't know, somewhere between 50 and 80% of the new price. You also think you're doing a good thing for the environment, for the planet and all the rest of it. And you are. But then again, there's some people who don't like handling secondhand books and they want to buy new ones. But I think those are the motivations.
- [33:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's so many different reasons. It's interesting to hear the facts about the, you know, the types of sellers that are common. It certainly makes sense. I'm thinking what I did when I graduated with my books, and I feel like I just gave them to my friends that were still at school.
- [34:10]
A
You were too nice.
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B
Yeah, well, I was, it was Covid. So I was like, I just like, need to just get Rid of these books. But I'm curious to, you know, you obviously are. You have so much data that you're accumulating about the book industry, about book buying. I'm sure, as you've said, like part of this is going into how you price books, how you price books in terms of the price you're going to buy them at the price you're going to sell them at. Is there anything else that you're doing with the data? I imagine like this could be quite valuable to the book industry, you know, to publishers. They could learn something about the, you know, the what, what.
- [34:45]
A
I'll answer that very quickly and absolutely not. You know, we, we. It's. That data is very guarded. Yeah. We have privacy statements on our site, et cetera, and we rigorously comply with those. In fact, personal data about who bought what isn't kept beyond a certain number of weeks, et cetera. So general data, I wish we used more of it and perhaps we will in the future, you know, with the sort of tools that are coming along now with AI et cetera. So perhaps, perhaps we will use more of it. But we do keep it, except for the personal stuff that gets, that gets removed.
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B
I'm curious for you personally. You obviously have access to so many books, so you're probably not starved for books yourself, but do you collect books? What do you have on your personal bookshelf? Do you have rare books?
- [35:54]
A
Do you know what? I used to read an awful lot before I started this business. I don't read anywhere as much as I used to. And I'm the guy who goes on vacation and forgets to grab a book from the warehouse for a go and end up in the bookshop at the airport to buy something to read on the plane. So I'm, yeah, I suppose seeing them all day, every day and all the rest of it, yeah, you become a bit blind to it. But yeah, I suppose the analogy is the guy who, the publican who runs a pub, he doesn't want, he doesn't want to be sampling his own product all the time, drinking the profits away. So yeah, sadly I'm less of an enthusiastic reader than I used to be. The way it went. My co founder, who's not involved in the business as much as I am day to day, actually has a very large personal library. So yeah, different route. I think I got absorbed into the pound shilling in pence of the business and all the rest of it and the engineering and the processes, etc. So yeah, yes, I think probably when I retire I'll probably take up reading a lot more again.
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B
You certainly have had a lot of time to see all the books that you might want to read at some point in the future.
- [37:33]
A
Yes, yes, we don't do that.
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B
Yeah, 10,000 books a day is just remarkable. It's a, you know, that volume is really wild. I'm, I'm wondering, you know, if there's any play, you know, what plans you have for the future of the business. Is it just to continue to grow in the uk? You met, you mentioned that you're going to start selling your books yourself. Anything else?
- [37:59]
A
So, yes, we will continue to grow at a modest rate in the uk where we have been looking at expanding was we sort of thought, right, well, yeah, the book market's probably fairly saturated. There's limited room for growth in the uk. Perhaps someone might want to take what we do in the UK and do it in the us, compete over there where the market's seven times larger. There are companies doing similar things but don't lose companies is doing it quite the same way we do. But I don't know. But what we have been looking at is for another product that, where we can buy and sell second hand. So we were looking for a product that had longevity, wasn't a fad. We were looking for something that, you know, was well engineered, lasts, where there's a growing worldwide market. And we happened upon Lego and so I know it's not book related but we have developed over the last two years a machine where you can pour a bucket from LEGO one end and it'll sort it out into its original sets, it'll sort it out into red bricks, yellow bricks, windows, trees, whatever. And we're about to launch that a few weeks time and we have a website called webuybricks.co.uk where people can currently sell us sets but in a few weeks time they'll be able to sell us the LEGO by the weight and it'll come into us and we'll try and sort it back into its original sets and sell those. So that's our new development and so we'll see how that goes.
- [40:04]
B
That's really fascinating. And I feel like, I feel like, yeah, the issue is you want something that is going to be easy to store. You know, Obviously books and CDs and DVDs are all sort of similar shape but LEGO boxes are as well, so it makes perfect sense. Um, and yeah, that's really fascinating that you've developed a machine that can actually sort the LEGO bricks.
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A
Yeah, we've sort of come across a few people in the world who claim they can. They've got a machine that does it, but they do YouTube videos of them. You never actually see them working. And, you know, it's, it's. There's 80,000 different Lego pieces. So we've had to work with the university in Scotland on AI techniques to recognize each piece of Lego using all these cameras and then sort them out. So, yeah, we've got the tech working. It's just taking time to teach the system what every piece of LEGO looks like.
- [41:08]
B
That's a super clever use of AI. I don't personally have kids, but I know people with young kids who lament how expensive Legos are. I mean, I remember playing with them when I was younger and I wasn't looking at the price, but I remember it being only on special occasions that I would, would get them. So I'm sure people would, you know, much rather pay.
- [41:30]
A
It is enormously expensive and light books, delectable sets that were retired many years ago that are still popular. There's even minifigures that go for multiple thousands pounds. Just a minifigure bit of plastic, like a bit of plastic body with a sticker on and a hat now that, you know, just, just flat for thousands of pounds. You don't find many of those very often, but it's. Yeah, we hope it'll work.
- [42:03]
B
So where can. To learn more about. We buy books. Where can listeners go? What's the best place?
- [42:09]
A
Well, the map place is our website. Yeah. Webybooks.co.uk unfortunately, we're restricted to. For the cost of getting the books to us. We can't buy books outside of the UK at the moment. If we could buy them from the usa, that'd be great. Unfortunately, the business model doesn't allow for the cost of getting books from the usa. Over here. May in the future, there may be ways of dealing with that. Right now, not. But if you've got books, so you're in the UK and you've got books, you want to see if they're worth selling to us. Webuybooks.co.uk and we also have an app you can download. Just type in. We buy books and download the app. The app is the better experience because you can use the camera as a barcode scanner. So same with the Lego. Webuybrooks.co.uk.com Wonderful.
- [43:10]
B
Well, Mike, thank you so much for talking about the secondhand book industry and building this company. It's a fascinating industry. And secondhand books, I think are so important for the book industry more broadly. So I applaud the work that you're doing and looking forward to see how it develops further.
- [43:29]
A
Thank you very much.