History
Jim and Yvonne first opened Emerald Coast Book Haven as an Internet bookstore in April of 1997. Jim created and maintained the ecbooks.com web site when he wasn't deployed on temporary duty with the United States Air Force and Yvonne ran the bookstore as a stay at home mother of three boys. They leased the Ingram Books in print database to make available over 400,000 new books to their customers. This was a tremendous amount of books at that time, which were dropped shipped from regional warehouses owned by Ingram. Jim and Yvonne soon discovered after six months that it was very difficult to provide good customer service and that drop shipping was too slow. They also realized that they couldn't compete with Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.
Yvonne's love of romance books made her decide to concentrate on a niche market. She stocked up on hot new romance books and Jim created a new web site called "A Romance Haven". After a few months the new web site was moderately successful but Yvonne still wasn't happy and wanted to further define her niche on the Internet. She decided to part with her collection of 4,000 used romance books so Jim added another web site called "A Treasure Haven". The used romance books were an immediate success and quickly outpaced the new romance books in total sales. Yvonne knew she was on to something and began to add more and more books to the used store.
In April 1999 the used romance book database reached 20,000 books. Yvonne decided to combine the new and used book databases into a single store and use "A Romance Haven" as the main web site. The database steadily grew to reach 35,000 books.
On October 1, 2002 Jim retired from the Air Force and began looking for work in his career field of telecommunications. Since the civilian telecomm sector had been hit so hard by the poor economy he had very little luck in finding a job. With four sons to feed and another one on the way (must be something in the water) he decided to join Yvonne in the book business. Together they opened Emerald Coast Book Haven, the physical bookstore, on Main Street in Crestview, Florida. In only a few months the store was bursting at the seams with books and a move to a newer, larger location was inevitable.
On June 3, 2004 they completed a relocation to their new store on Highway 90 west in Crestview, Florida. This store gave them nearly 3,000 square feet of floor space which they quickly filled to capacity. In less than two years books were filling every nook and cranny and talk began of expanding into the adjacent beauty salon. On January 1, 2009 Emerald Coast Book Haven finally completed their expansion into the former beauty salon and gained an additional 1,000 square feet of space.
So if you're ever in the area please stop by and browse their ever increasing inventory of books. There are now over 100,000 books to choose from in all categories including Children, Religious, True Crime, Cooking, Crafts, and many, many others.
Thanks for stopping by,
jim@ecbooks.com
We accept Master Card, Visa, Checks, and of course cash.