Bookselling, Served Two Ways

You know the little books section you see in grocery stores, like Bi-Lo? Why the heck would they ever sell books in a grocery store? (Come to think of it, it may be reminiscent of the good ol' drug store days.) An even better question: Who actually regularly buys books from a grocery store anyway? My dad claims to have bought a few books from a grocery store, and I can picture an old lady that doesn't get out much getting her novel at the grocery store, but I fail to see how it can be profitable enough to not replace the shelf space with some sort of food. There's gotta be a something that I'm not seeing.

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On the way back from La Grange to visit relatives, we stopped in a mall to grab some lunch. (When none of my family can agree on a place to eat, variety often wins out.) Anyways, we passed by a book store in the mall that was having a closing sale, probably due to a Barnes and Noble moving in across the street. Hardcover books for $4, paperbacks for $2. I saw some copies of one of Seth Godin's books (who I'm a big fan of), so I picked up a copy.

I was wondering how hard it is to sell something on Amazon.com or Ebay, so I bought 2 copies, with the intention of selling one on Amazon, and reading one myself. When I went online this evening, I saw something that suprised me. Two people were selling used copies for one cent each, and several people under a dollar. It didn't take much reasoning to figure out that these people were making their profit off of shipping and handling, not the sale price.

This seems like a quite obvious problem, and quite obviously is keeping new sellers from entering the marketplace. Why doesn't amazon.com come up with a better solution to the shipping profit problem, when it is a definate bottleneck to their already flustering growth?