Mr. Brill said the operation would be profitable, in part because it would not warehouse books, but rely on Ingram to handle all the back-office operations.
"A Brief Look at the Dakin Publishing Company and Its Fire Insurance Maps". California Warehouse Book; Fire Map of Chico.
This was largely due to the up-front expenses in traditional book publishing: typesetting, and then printing and binding a book in long press runs; warehousing the books and having to distribute them to innumerable book stores around the country; marketing and publicity...
And publishers have to pay authors and editors, as well as rent and administrative overhead, not to mention the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books, which continue to account for the large majority of their sales.
By contrast, Alibris has a growing staff of 100 at its administrative offices in Emeryville, Calif., a warehouse of books in Sparks, Nev., and another distribution warehouse planned for England.
Libraries' role in warehousing large book collections is rapidly becoming redundant, according to a study.
If the New York Public Library has its way, this facade will no longer stand guard over a warehouse of books, but a light-flooded reading room.
The library is also building a $4.7 million climate-controlled warehouse for books and bound periodicals on a 100-acre site in Maryland that was donated by the Army, and it is renovating a building in Culpeper, Va., to store audiovisual materials.
The Amherst library, completed in 1965 and named for Robert Frost, was typical of many American college libraries, a roomy and airy interior that was intended to increase the building's attraction as a center of campus life, not simply to function as a warehouse for books and periodicals.
