
A Penny for Your Books (2015) - axiomdata316
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html
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xavierstein
The one thing this article doesn't touch on, that I wish it had, is condition.
I'm a large buyer of used books from places like AbeBooks and Amazon, and the
conditions simply cannot be trusted, especially from the larger sellers like
Owl Books, Thriftbooks, and Better World Books.

Almost every time I buy a book listed as "Very Good" which has a clear
definition on AbeBooks' website[1], I end up getting something with clear
markings, or damage.

[1] [https://www.abebooks.com/books/rarebooks/collecting-
guide/un...](https://www.abebooks.com/books/rarebooks/collecting-
guide/understanding-rare-books/guide-book-conditions.shtml)

~~~
pmiller2
Amazon has somewhat recently modified their definition of “very good” to allow
actual damage rather than just shelf wear. I returned a book last week that
had a big gouge in the spine. I’ve previously had good luck buying VG books,
but now I might have to rethink buying used from Amazon at all.

~~~
xavierstein
That's good to know. I may also have to stop buying used from Amazon. It seems
IOBA also allows for damage[1], but it must be noted, which seems to be the
main issue.

[1] [http://www.ioba.org/pages/resources/condition-
definitions/](http://www.ioba.org/pages/resources/condition-definitions/)

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bridanp
The list of storefronts the author gave in the article (Silver Arch Books,
Owls Books, Yellow Hammer Books and Sierra Nevada Books) look like they are
all "owned" by Thriftbooks, which was interviewed in the article (just search
Amazon and then one of the names to find the seller profile). Maybe
Thriftbooks has a separate storefront for each warehouse?

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Arrezz
Fascinating article! A couple of times I've been wondering what happens to old
books that libraries inevitably have to dispose of. I wonder how often a
diamond in the rough is uncovered in this process and how many books are
"lost" because of some scanning fault. So much of our past culture only exist
in old books.

~~~
schoen
My father is a used bookdealer and one of his sources of inventory on occasion
has been library discards. (Books with library markings that are sold online
ought to be marked "ex-library", not just "used", so that the buyer isn't
surprised by this.)

But it's amazing to see this level of automation and scale. My father was
manually cataloguing everything and then selling ex-library books for at least
a few dollars apiece (often more based on rarity). The dealers profiled here
are able to do this on a scale orders of magnitude larger, and cheaper, than a
small-scale bookdealer could do by hand -- at least without barcodes.

The barcodes, as mentioned in the article, are a huge deal in that they can
change some kinds of cataloguing from minutes of labor to seconds of labor.
But ISBNs themselves were only invented in the early 1970s and bar codes on
books weren't common until the 1980s. Depending on what decade the books
you're dealing with are from, the level of automation of cataloguing could
also vary quite a lot.

One thing you'll also see (which antagonized my father quite a bit as a dealer
but which can definitely be seen as a huge boon for readers) is that
individual people will go to huge sales, like library sales, at the earliest
possible moment with phone apps and try to scan thousands of books to find
those that will sell at enough of a premium above the sale price to be worth
buying. Traditional dealers with brick-and-mortar shops and/or specialized
knowledge of some area have some rather negative terms for these competitors,
who notably may not have a lot of personal knowledge of the books they're
reselling, but do have a lot of dexterity and access to big online databases.

In general, online databases and subsequently mobile apps have done a lot to
make the used book market much more competitive, and also much more accessible
for smaller-scale participation by non-experts. That's often a hard thing for
used book shops and a useful thing for readers.

Library discards or "deaccessionment" are still a sad thing to me, and I think
to most librarians too, although they'll often point out that many volumes
that are being deaccessioned haven't been checked out in years. A good thing
for preservation is that the Internet Archive now acquires a lot of these
volumes in various ways and scans them with the goal of getting them online.

There are absolutely books still being thrown in the trash all the time that
would be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to the right buyer, but
they're also an incredibly tiny fraction of the books that are thrown away.

> how many books are "lost" because of some scanning fault

Scanning processes are getting better and better, so I also think this is a
diminishing problem.

Nicholson Baker wrote a fascinating book called _Double Fold_ in which he
pointed out that paper books are typically much more durable than many people
think¹, and that digitization and imaging projects have significant drawbacks
and limitations. Librarians were quite annoyed with this book because it
attacked them as negligent stewards of history. I don't think Baker's
arguments have aged very well, as current scanning options are much better and
have produced much more useful results than many of those he attacked.

¹ This is true -- Baker points out that our intuitions about fragile paper are
mostly shaped by a few decades in the 20th century in which the use of high-
acid paper became common for cheap mass-market books, and also for newspapers
and magazines. Most older books were printed on lower-acid paper which often
lasts for many centuries without major degradation. I have a number of books
from the 1700s that are still in great shape and can be read by hand without
damaging them (though most have been rebound, because the bindings are
normally more fragile than the pages).

~~~
saalweachter
Random anecdote time.

At a used bookstore recently (in Hobart Book Village), my too-young-to-read
daughter took a fancy to _The Life of a Bear_, probably because of its 24
illustrated prints involving bears. After realizing it was a ~120 year old
book and gently extracting it before she removed one of the pictures, I became
slightly fascinated with it.

It appears to be a perfectly cromulent children's chapter book, of similar
vintage and theme to _Black Beauty_. Its author was anonymous; in the edition
I have, he is simply referred to as "by the author of 'The Life of an
Elephant'", the author of which was referred to as "by the author of 'The Life
of a Bear'." You can find reprints on Amazon by one of the "reprint any out of
copyright books" companies, and a half dozen old editions on ABE.

After much detective work and the WorldCat database, and the assistance of a
professional librarian, I did eventually discover the author to be apparently
one Sir S Eardley-Wilmot, who was a naval officer at the time (hence the
anonymous publishing; it probably didn't pay to be "the naval officer who
writes children's books"); he did apparently republish the books under his own
name, after he retired, and a third book "The Life of a Tiger" was eventually
published, maybe posthumously. He even gets his own Wikipedia article, which
mentions the books he wrote on military history, but not his children's
offerings.

So anyway, the point of the anecdote.

One point I could make is on the ineffable mystery of why some books are
cultural classics and others aren't; why is _Black Beauty_ still beloved by
millions, and _The Life of a Bear_ forgotten? Is it purely a matter of
artistic merit, do people just like horses more than bears, is there an
underlying message to Black Beauty I don't remember since reading it 30 years
ago that resonates?

Another point I could make is on the surprising robustness of this print
volume, as you mentioned. It has probably been forgotten for a hundred years,
not particularly well cared for, just thrown on a shelf somewhere and still in
good enough shape.

Or it could be on the inanity of most of the books we are slowly forgetting.
Does it really matter if this children's story about a bear vanishes from the
Earth? Has our culture been lessened, did we forget something important we
once knew, are people less happy for not having read this book?

But what really sticks with me is something completely different: this book is
not in the long tail of books. Maybe not the fat head, but solidly in the
chubby middle. It received many print editions from multiple publishers on
different continents over the course of 30, 40 years. It's in _multiple_
libraries; it's been digitized and is available for reprint at the push of a
button. It's probably in the top 10 million of the ~130 million books ever
published.

Can you _imagine_ what is in the bottom ~120 million books?

~~~
kthejoker2
Without casting aspersions on the fine authorship of The Life of a Bear:

* Black Beauty is a phenomenally well-written book, with fair comparisons to Bronte, Hardy and Dickens; and is certainly not viewed as a "children's book"

* written about horses at a time when horses were the world's most owned animal;

* and also at a bleak moment in the Industrial Revolution when the workhouse, child labor, and workplace hazards were at a local maximum.

So a fair mix of good timing and subject matter, combined with an excellent
execution.

Anyway tldr everyone should re-read Black Beauty.

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pretendscholar
Ah thats how thrift books works. I was wondering how they could offer books so
cheaply.

~~~
gowld
It's right there in the name -- it's a "thrift" store, a store that resells
product that people have given away / disposed of.

~~~
pretendscholar
I meant the specifics. Where and how did they get the books in such volume. I
didn't know of the arrangements with thrift stores to take huge volumes of
books.

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teslabox
Earlier this year I was looking for a specific book from the early 2000's. It
was priced around $60-$100+ at most of the used book sites, which I thought
was rather excessive for what I assumed was a little trade paperback.

After a few months a copy turned up on ebay for $15. I looked into the seller,
thrift.books (mentioned in this story), decided I wasn't taking advantage of a
little mom-and-pop bookseller, and purchased it. It was indeed a little trade
paperback.

While most of this type of book would go for a penny, this one is valued much
higher because of the chemical recipes. The author was somewhat miffed at the
profiteering taking place in his industry, and told his audience how to reap
the benefits of the book without being ripped off.

------
parenthesis
Where physical used-book stores have an advantage is with long-time out-of-
copyright classic novels: it can be hard to tell online whether or not you are
looking at a thin paper, badly typeset, badly edited edition or a beautiful
one.

~~~
aidenn0
They are often cheaper than amazon as well; the floor is about $3 after
shipping.

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gowld
The desperate plea at the end, asking readers to pay more for used books is
bizarre. Authors don't profit from used book sales, and the price of a book is
not its value -- merely an approximate lower bound. The natural reaction to a
more efficient resale market is to raise prices on the new products (at the
risk of creating a market for lemons).

~~~
pretendscholar
I think its a plea to take the (in their view ) more serendipitous, meaningful
approach of discovering something on the shelf in a quirky second-hand book
store.

