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

sounds like a good idea

[BattleTroll]

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.

Good for them

[exhilaration]

I've been to plenty of local library sales and not only do most people simply ignore them, but less 10% of the books are sold.

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.

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" ;)

brilliant

[moquist]

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...

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.

Even Goodwill is starting to do this

[CatGrep]

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.

Re:Maybe if we ended public funding...

[EvilNTUser]

"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.