Jackson Street Books, Inc. owner Tony Arnold said Athens can't support a used book store anymore.

He closed the doors of the shop on Sunday after 31 years of business.

Arnold said he has seen reading go out of style and the downtown area attract less tourists and local shoppers since he began running the store in the 1990s. Those are two of the many reasons he said it was time to stop selling books one by one.

"Factor in decreasing interest in books, aliteracy, downloading texts, competition with other forms of recreation like video games, all of that stuff, all of these things that people get wrapped up in instead of reading to enrich their lives - that's what you're fighting against. You're fighting against all the books on Amazon. The obstacles are essentially endless," Arnold said.

The name Jackson Street Books will live on as a wholesaler. Arnold will continue to run the business selling batches of books to collectors or other book sellers, he said. He will keep the space on Jackson Street until he can find another.

On Monday, Arnold was working inside his shop selling boxes full of the more than 55,000 books that crowd the wooden shelves inside.

The store is now only open to book sellers, not the public.

"Unfortunately this business just isn't profitable anymore unless you can sell books by the box-load, or better yet the car-full," Arnold said.

He just finished ringing up a few customers with boxes full of books, totalling to a couple hundred dollars for each transaction.

One book dealer inside the store Monday, Kenneth Mallory, of Decatur, said he can often find books here he can sell for a profit in another part of the country.

"It's the context of where something is sold. A book that I can buy at the Florida book fair for $300, when I take it to the New York Park Avenue Armory in April, I can sell it for $1,000," Mallory said.

Mallory and another book seller in the shop on Monday, David McCord, said they often act as middle men bringing the right book to an interested audience to turn a profit.

"There's a few different avenues to sell books now. There's the Internet, but it's a marketplace that is very volatile. The prices go up and down. … There are book fairs nationally, and that tends to be the higher end of the book seller food chain. … There's also special collections or archives or collectors you can sell to," McCord said.

Those are the avenues Arnold said he'll be looking into in the future. He wants to whittle his stock down to collectables and first editions.

In the last decade fewer and fewer general book enthusiasts stop in Jackson Street Books, Arnold said. In the 1990s avid readers would spend $500 a weekend at the store regularly, he said. That doesn't happen anymore.

"What we've seen more and more is people having an extremely specific and obscure want and they come here looking for that, and it's like a needle in a haystack. The chances of any bookstore having that one particular thing you're looking for is almost nonexistent," Arnold said.

Arnold said he found it wasn't profitable to sell individual books to the public now.

"We finally got to the break even point where in a strictly mathematical sense it wasn't worth being in business anymore," Arnold said.

While he hasn't lost hope in all bookstores, he said he thinks Athens won't be able to support one anymore.

"We used to have tourists, people visiting The Classic Center, visiting parents or visiting scholars from overseas would stop in here, but downtown just isn't the same," Arnold said.