Public Libraries Trading Quaintness For Cash

theodp writes "To help nourish lean budgets, public libraries are increasingly eyeing the e-commerce used-book market as an alternative to the long-standing community tradition of the local book sale. Abebooks reports a tenfold surge in public library clients over the last three years. The payoff can be handsome. One library group boasts of getting $250 for a few boxes of 'miserable, horrible stuff' and another $110 from a World War II vet for a book about his Army regiment. A public library in Texas auctioned 300 items on eBay to help plug a budget hole. And a Seattle suburb moved its annual library sale of some 80,000 books to Amazon, citing expediency and extra cash as motivators."

Comments

Why not? No other funding is available

[Ars-Fartsica]

Maybe this wouldn't be an issue if education, libraries, and other intellectual infrastructure was being funded at levels accepted as a minimum elsewhere in the industrialized world.

Re:Funding

[bluprint]

and some of us don't believe a thing like a library should be a "public good"...but go right on shoving that down our throats.

Re:sounds like a good idea

[aquarian]

As it stands, people could probably make a pretty penny by going to the public library, buying up the books for a quarter a piece then selling them online. It would be a good way to turn a $50 investment into $500.. (I've been tempted, I've noticed several of the books I bought from Amazon marketplace have library marks on them. So there are people who've fallen for the temptation.)

I know people who have been doing this since eBay started. Library sales, garage sales, thrift stores, etc. Vinyl LPs have been a pretty hot item too.

Again, I don't know why it's taken libraries so long to figure this out, but then again they're not run by the snappiest people in the world either.