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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."
This sounds like a good idea to me. Why not put the books out there where supply and demand takes hold? If they can get more money by selling to broader audience, more power to them.
And here I've been helping fund them by bringing back their books after they're overdue and paying the fines. Turns out I could just buy the books from them on eBay. Who knew?
Why not consider BookCrossing too? Free the public library books!
It's just a BloJJ
Maybe if we gave the libraries more actual funding they wouldn't need to turn to good old-fashioned capitalism to raise the funds they need to stay current.
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. If they can get rid of them online, more power to them.
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" ;)
This sounds like a brilliant idea to me. I have a friend who theorizes that the function of technology is always to "remove the middle" somehow, and it's easy to see how the Internet "removes the middle" of the commerce chain, by more directly linking buyers and sellers.
Sure, there may be a loss of quaintness, but if the gain is that more people are getting books they want at prices they like, and libraries are getting more money to get new materials, who's really loosing out?
I've got a wheelbarrow-full of musty old books I bought at a library sale, if anybody's bidding...
And it's a good thing for us book lovers too.
More used books available online, but especially more OUT OF PRINT used books...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
But books ... there's a certain romance to browsing piles and piles of old books, never knowing what gem you'll find in the next shoebox.
I miss the huge "Friends of the Library" booksales in Ithaca (at one time, the largest used book sale in North America): for ten bucks, you could stagger out with shopping bags full of stuff.
Now, living in New Mexico in the middle of nowhere, I do appreciate Amazon. And I do understand that public libraries need to make a buck, because rich people need their tax breaks more than they need a thriving community around them. But I'll be sad to see the used book sales go.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Sounds good to me. In all the examples given the books ended up with people who will really enjoy them, as oppossed to the normal clearence sale method where people often just grab something random that looks like it might be interesting, and half the time it just ends up in the dumpster or used book store anyway. On top of that the library makes some money which helps it make more books freely available to the public.
There is the rare case where someone local will really want a book, so perhaps they could be given first preference, but all in all it sounds like a win-win to me.
One thing to keep in mind about those quaint old books in libraries is that many of them are older reference books full of incorrect or nearly-useless information. Much of this stuff is just wasting shelf space and rotting away, and the books would be better off in a private collection or a museum. The way I see it, better the library sell off old encyclopedias full of outdated geopolictical and scientic information and buy current, useful books, than for a kid researching data-storage technology to go to the library and not be able to find a book on the subject among endless shelves of twentieth-century remnants.
There is very good justification to provide public libraries with public funds paid for from general government revenue-- that is, for the population as a whole to support public libraries.
There exist two reasons for this: academic and economic. I consider increasing the level of education of the population (that part of the population that uses public libraries at least) to be a justification for government spending.
However, some people do not agree with a purely educational justification. The second justification is economic. Public libraries are a comparatively cheap way to increase the skills people, which makes them more valuable to a knowledge economy.
Ebay ended real garage sale bargains.... and now if libraries start posting online it will be the end of the $0.50 hardback bargain book.
My mom bought our first encyclopedia from a local library for $15. Not that encylopedia's will be sold online or are even useful nowadays, but you get the point.
On the other hand, its great for the Library system I guess, as public funds are obviously lacking (that same local library was shut down less than 10 months ago).
But on the other other hand, why weren't these invaluable books (such as the WWII diary) kept in the library itself and made available to the public??? I never donate books to the library, because public libraries (at least the ones i've been to) have a policy of not incorporating donated books into their collections.
My family donated a set of classic childrens novels to the local library (which we knew they did not currently have available for public borrowing) thinking we would be helping the community's youth, but instead we found our donated books on the book sale shelves being sold for $0.25 and $0.50 a piece. We ended up buying all of the books that were left, back, and never donated books again.
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.
In the public library I work at, the offloading of books goes to the "Friends of the Library" group which seems to handle a bit of the funding (the parts that don't come from government, that is) They'd have a local monthly book sale for anything they can't/don't keep, then redistribute the funds for the betterment of the library. Modernizing machinery, billboards, supplies for the children's section, etc.
:)
From what I know of the members of the "Friends" where I'm at, they're not very computer savvy, and I'm not sure how they'd handle maintaining stuff with e-bay and amazon. Also, while it seems like a good marketplace, there's the additional burden of storage space. How long do you keep an item for sale before you realize it won't get bought and should be "recycled" instead? On a local sale, it's easier to decide. With a global audience, people tend to wait out a bit longer than they should.
In the long run, though, any good way to raise funds for local libraries is a welcome thought. Oh...and visit your local library.
"people who actually use libraries would have to bear the cost -- I certainly don't think I should have to pay for something I never use."
Yeah, and then poor people couldn't afford information. Wonderful.
My Sig: SEGV
Yes, but the resource is there if you ever need it. I haven't called the police in 13 years, and even then it was to report an automobile accident I saw, but I don't mind paying taxes in order for them to be there when I need them.
There are a lot of public resources I don't choose to use that I don't mind paying for. Not everything is about me.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I certainly don't think I should have to pay for something I never use.
That's one of those sorts of statements that sound reasonable at first reading, but fall apart after further contemplation:
Even if you never drive a car, the publicly-funded roads benefit you by helping to reduce shipping costs for the products you buy.
Even if you never have kids, the publicly-funded school systems benefit you by helping to improve the education of those with whom you share a society (and to whom you might otherwise be contributing more tax dollars for welfare/entitlement programs).
I'd say libraries similarly benefit you even if you never visit one.
everything in moderation
Why shouldn't the libraries get the top dollar for their books? They're perennially short on the crispies and use it for the benefit of the community.
The Law of Falling Bodies
Everyone seems to be missing the point. The libraries are selling the books rather than putting them on the shelves!
They do this because of commercial pressure. If everyone donated their old CDs and videos to the library, it would be unnecessary to rent or buy any of the older ones; you could borrow them. Somehow the people who want to corrupt the system, apparently publishers, have gotten control over the libraries. Have your ever noticed that the CDs and videos in the library are never the latest albums and movies? Certainly by now some family has decided not to let their children watch "Finding Nemo" any more times.
Everyone posting is so willingly believing that all the donated books are ones no one would want to check out of a library. But that's not so. For example, there are many books I would donate if I knew I could check them out later.
However, the librarians of the Multnomah County Central Library (in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.) have told me that putting a book in their system costs $30, and somehow it is cheaper to buy a new one! Over the years I have often mentioned the illogic in this. But all of them continue parroting the same line.
Consider the doctrine of first sale, in which you are allowed to do anything you want with your legally purchased copyrighted material, if you do not make a copy. Publishers have corrupted the doctrine of first sale so that copying into RAM to listen it or view it has been considered an illegal copy.
The real disturbing trend is that libraries are subscribing to periodical databases instead of building thier own hard copy or microfilm ones. This means the library is at the mercy of the periodical database owner rather than owner of the physical documents.
Rarely accessed obscure journals, newspapers, documents will eventually be dropped from databases and thus not be available to anyone at any cost.
A secondary issue is the case of someone claiming copyright ownership of public domain material because they scanned it in and serve it on web pages.
By ratting out her friends to the RIAA, of course.
OK, now I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but I'll bite anyway.
Assuming I never drive a car, but buy lots of products, it's not likely I'm paying much for roads, since a large portion of the cost of roads comes from gasoline tax. So, this is sort of an inverse example. Of course it benefits me to gain benefit from something I never pay for.
I have no idea what portion of road funding comes from gas taxes, and neither do you. The point stands, however; whether or not you directly use something should not necessarily be the deciding factor in whether or not you pay a share for it.
First, even though I do pay for public schools, there are still lots of uneducated (or just stupid?) people around. So it seems my money is just being wasted. Second, the whole "you might otherwise be contributing more tax dollars for..." arguments is kind of silly. I question having to subsidize the activities of others, and you respond with "well, you would still have to do it anyway". The point is, if someone wants to be educated, they should have to pay for it. If they choose not to be educated (i.e. qualify for welfare, etc.) they should have to pay for that too (where in this case, "paying for it" means simply living with the consequences).
Yeah, great logic! Since there is still crime, why don't we get rid of the police, too? Seems the money is just being wasted and all, just like schools and dumb people, right? Wrong. Your ideology is confusing your economics. And you called my argument silly? Ha ha.
If it's cheaper to fund schools than pay welfare for 50% of the population, then it's a better deal for everyone if we collectively fund schools instead of increased welfare.
I couldn't pay my own way through college -- I had to get grants and loans (mostly grants) from Uncle Sam (read: from tax money). So, your taxes paid my way through school. Bad deal? No, because now I pay lots of taxes (much, much more than I would had I remained uneducated with low pay). And now we both benefit.
I'm afraid you're one of those "uneducated (or just stupid?)" people if you really think this way (and again, I doubt it -- you are trolling for sure with this contrived nonsense).
everything in moderation