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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."
Why not consider BookCrossing too? Free the public library books!
It's just a BloJJ
Our local GoodWill has two 'outlet' stores.
Basically these are large warehouses where the stuff that didn't sell at the regular GoodWill store ends up in large bins and is sold by the pound. We call it simply 'The Bins' and it has spawned an interesting sub-culture of it's own.
It's a great place to go look for books (books are seperated and put in their own bins so you don't have to claw though clothes to find them) and lots of eBay/half.com sellers go there to buy books for 25 cents each (50cents for hardbacks). When new book bins come out it's a frenzy of books flying as the book sellers elbow each other for position. How do I know? I visited the book bins last August and September to make money to live on.
Now, GoodWill has gotten wise and they pre-screen the books that go into the bins for sale on various online outlets, so it's not quite as lucrative visiting the bins anymore.
My experience has been otherwise. My family has been involved in organization, setup, and cleanup of the local library's book sale for as long as I can remember. I'd have to say, as a sort of wild guess, that if "only" 70% of the books offered sell, we consider that a poor sale.
I don't see any reason for libraries to go through the enormous trouble of organizing a local sale just to keep a handful of patrons happy.
I can't speak for all libraries, but at mine, the book sale is entirely run by a volunteer group called the "Friends of the Library." The sale costs the library essentially nothing as far as money, time, or labor are concerned.
I thought I'd do a "me too" post here, since what you posted is virtually identical to what I would have said!
My family has also been heavily involved in "Friends of the Library" booksales for the library in the town I grew up in. 10% would be a gross under estimate there, too. Indeed, the sales are all run during normal library hours in a room that is vacant the rest of the time anyway. So as you point out, it costs the library almost nothing to do this.
Now, the volunteer efforts by the Friends to make these sales happen are a year round effort. So indeed, it is "enormous trouble" to organize a local sale, but it's done by people as a volunteer effort. They like doing it!
The sales actually make quite a bit of money. $10k in 2 days isn't uncommon.
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Much like a newborn puppy...
Well, many of the books that go into booksales are books that have been REMOVED from the library shelves. There are a variety of reasons for weeding a particular book; not being checked out is chief among them. Of course we have to weed the shelves, in order to make room for the new stuff.
Other things that would be sold certainly are donated books. I know it's hard when you donate stuff that you expect to see on the shelves and then it gets sold; it happened to me two months ago. But a human being has to make a call about how it fits into the collection. Some human beings are good at this and some aren't or don't care. And sometimes they decide not to add something for good and valid reasons, though you can't see it.
(One of the reasons is that the person making the call knows that it takes $10-$40 to add a new title to the library's database, so they have to decide if this "free" book is really worth $20 to the library, when the overworked behind the scenes staff is already behind on processing the brand new titles that people are waiting for.)
As for the latest CDs and videos not being at the library: either 1) that particular library decided not to get new stuff (rare, but some libraries made that decision); 2) the library has ordered them but they're not done being processed yet (often 6 months at my library); or 3) the library owns them but they're all checked out or stolen.
I know it seems illogical that it could be cheaper to buy a new copy than to accept a gift. But it's frequently true. It does take about $30 worth of staff time to add a new title. If the gift happens to be exactly the same edition, it's fairly quick to slap a barcode on it; maybe $5-$10 in materials and staff time altogether. But if it happens to not match exactly, which happens WAAAAY more often than you'd think, it has to be recataloged as a new title. And that can take from $20-40 of staff time and resources. Having the library reorder a new book means they can get exactly the same edition, so statistically speaking it saves time and money. I know the whole thing sounds illogical, but the reason librarians all parrot the same line is that it's true, honestly.
Hope some of this helps.
-A public library cataloger
Putting a book in a library collection is not as easy as taking it from the Donations bucket and putting randomly on the shelves. For the book to be useful, it has to be cataloged, which means not only entering the title and author from the title page, but figuring out where to shelve it in the library's specific collection (some libraries may be content to throw, for example, all programming books in one section, while others may wish to seperate the Perl books from the Python books, and the MFC books from the Linux kernel internals books), and figuring out what subject headings to use. (I've seen the binder containing the canonical rules for English-language cataloging -- it's decidedly non-trivial.) Amazon and Google have done great things to increase the availability of knowledge, but it still takes a well-trained human to figure out the optimal metadata for a book.
(It still boggles my mind that Amazon refuses to do the Right Thing while searching for authors -- if I click on the "William Gibson" link while looking at, say, Neuromancer (not an affiliate link, don't worry), I end up at a search page that shows me not only books by William Gibson the sci-fi author, but Lord of the Flies (which was written by by William Golding and illustrated by Ben Gibson), and books about William Shakespear written by someone with Gibson somewhere in the name, and all sorts of outrageous results that no respectable librarian would be caught dead with. But I digress.)
In addition to the cataloging, a book must also be properly protected in order to not disintegrate prematurely. Most (if not all) of the library books I've checked out have at least library-grade clear tape protecting the cover and the spine; publishers offer higher-strength library bindings for many books as well. This protection costs money, both in terms of the staff time (and training) and the materials used.
All of this costs money -- perhaps not nearly as much as the US$30 figure quoted above, but definately significantly above US$0.
There are shortcuts to the lengthy acquisitions process. Some book distributors who sell books specifically to libraries offer MARC records (the canonical format for exchanging library catalog information) on a CD they ship with the box of books. These distributors also have access to higher-strength bindings and automated processes for securing and labeling a book to library specifications. All of these methods work only with new books, though, which is why it may in fact be cheaper to buy a book new than to move a used donation through the acquisitions process.