Mr Book it is the End of the Line for you

I, like many other secondhand book shop owning hopefuls, came here by the hobby turning to business route. One of the handicaps of this background is that your love of books can make it difficult to to decide when a book is simply not saleable and it has to go. And then off course, once you make that decision, where does it go?

Every so often I have been asked to donate books to send to exotic locations like Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea and I respond with gusto. Beautiful sets of Britannica, maths and science textbooks that have suffered only from inbuilt obsolescence due to bi-annual updates, time life library books, exlibrary books, childrens’ non fiction, picture books; anything in good condition that I have an excess of that could be put to better use overseas I happily waved bon voyage to.

But I can no longer store books just in case someone contacts me for a similar scheme (though if someone knows of one leaving Melbourne Australia anytime soon let me know and I will accumulate some books for you). Any spare capacity has been long consumed by the endless parade of books that are traded in on a daily basis. Too many days of bring in 10 take out 2 have seen to that.

As books come in I am pretty good at culling the unsaleable. Books that were already populating the shelves I find much more difficult to cull, but don’t ask me why that it is. I used to leave the culled books on the window ledge at the front of the shop for people to take. It didn’t matter what I put out there, it went. What it didn’t seem to do was encourage those people to come in and buy from me. In fact one customer commented that people were leaving lots of books for me on the window ledge and while that was very occasionally true most of the time it was my trade in culls and the like. So my possibly misplaced generousity was being misconstrued as well.

Anyhow I got sick of it. I thought about the fact that people can only read so many books and that if second hand books are secondary goods then FREE second hand books would be tertiary books and why buy if you can get for free. Not even the charity shops give away free items they can’t sell. You might rather read Harlen Coben than Sidney Sheldon but if the Sidney Sheldon is free, well it’ll do.

Now I have reinstituted the $1 bargain trolley (being in Australia $1 is cheaper than most charity shops around here would sell books for). If books don’t sell off the $1 trolley then they go in the paper recycle. I very much doubt the charity shops around here would appreciate books I couldn’t sell for a dollar for the same reason I couldn’t sell them for a dollar. And the truth is charity shops are my competitors. How many people come in and set the scene with a “I usually buy my books at the op shop” or “ I got a copy of this at The Most Generous Charity in the World Shop for $2 and you are selling it for $8”.

The reality is there are far more second hand books in circulation that people who are ready, willing and able to buy and read them and although some might call it a crime against humanity or even the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time, for me sending unsaleable books to paper recycling is a better business decision than donating to the charity shop up the road or giving them away.