Baseball book market: not dead, but merely resting? Beautiful spalding on ebay

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Posted By: scgaynor

In my opinion, the prices of books are going to continue to go down, not up. There may be spikes as one or two new collectors enter the market (actually you really need at least two), but as more and more books become available in e-book format, there is less of a reason to own a hardcopy.

Google wants to copy each page of every book ever printed. That is an impossible task, but it can be done with pretty much every baseball book printed, especially if a copy exists in the Library of Congress. If you can read the book online, there is less interest in owning the original, this goes for all books. People are moving towards having less possessions, not more, and books take up alot of space. The same thing is already happening in the world of collectible Records and CD's. You can take every baseball book ever printed and store it on an external hard drive only a few inches big.

There will always be some collectors who want to hold the book in thier hands and turn the pages, but I think that it will be a shrinking collector class.

I hope for the sake of the hobby that I am wrong.

Scott