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

This is excellent

[HMA2000]

My friend works in a used book store. He is also an obsessed bibliophile. Anyway, he ran into some hard times and had to sell a lot of his books. They were mostly trash that he would never read anyway. He put them up on bookfinder.com and got on average about $75/box of books (about 50-70 book/box) with some books going for well over $100. I remember thinking as he was doing that "Man the library could make a killing on this type of stuff" Too bad I never followed up on that I could have been a "consultant" ;)

Libraries have the advantage of data feeds

[_Sharp'r_]

To sell used books on Amazon, a private individual generally has to type in the details of their normally small inventory, then create some make-shift packaging to ship it to the new owner. This is a big disadvantage compared to the local garage sale.

In comparison, libraries are on the other side of the equation. They have a hassle of moving large numbers of books around to try to sell them physically locally, but already have all the book details in electronic form.

This means that a library can not only just use Amazon's AWS services to load all their available titles directly into Amazon's online used book database using XML over http or SOAP, but can use the outputs of sales information to take the titles out of their systems and automatically print-up shipping information for the new owner.

In this case it's easy to see why libraries would be flocking to data fed book sales in droves, especially when you add in the factor of obscure books finding the "right" buyer from a much larger customer base, versus the usually limited local audience. Those advantages more than outweigh the extra costs of shipping.