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Book 'Em, Dano
theodp writes "An Oregon library worker was arrested after selling at least $10,000 worth of stolen library books, CDs and videotapes online in the past six months. The thief, who scanned the Net to find items in demand and went to the library to check them out, was busted after an alert college president noticed his copy of the recently-published I am Charlotte Simmons, purchased on Amazon.com, sported a library receipt with a due date of Dec. 26. Earlier this month, it was reported that a VT man was arrested for stealing hundreds of books from college libraries and bookstores and selling them on Amazon, realizing more than $4,000. The library thefts are somewhat ironic, since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the NY Times seemed to suggest there might be fewer books in libraries if the Authors Guild, who opposed Amazon's used book sales practices, had their way. Bezos also once told angry booksellers there's no reason why Amazon should have to collect sales taxes, arguing that Amazon gets no police services from other states."
Damn, this guy's a smart one... genious.
To be honest, this sort of thing really grips my shit. Ebay is full of people doing this sort of thing - not what people might think of as 'stolen goods' but things they've borrowed from work or been issued and then flog on ebay.
I'm in the military and every now and again do a search for Military kit, ebay is crawling with brand new stuff that could only have come from stores, so basicly someone is getting it issued, or taking a few bits home and then flogging them straight onto eBay to make a few extra dollars - it still amounts to the same thing.
As a part time resident of VT the past 5 years (the majority of the fall/winter), I can't say this surprises me. Norwich is about 10 miles away and is a military oriented university. I wonder what titles he was pulling out? Anyways, this is just another creative theft of product/services. Contrary to many popular beliefs, Vermont is not the idllyic paradise many would have you believe. High welfare rates, little job growth, few police and much unreported crime. I'll give that this guy was more creative than most, but he is still the typical dirtbag.
Great, so we get to pay taxes on online orders because some asshole stole some library books? Instead of paying the taxes, why not just shoot the jerk. Then nobody else will try it. I buy a lot of books online and they are expensive enough as it is.
Someone you trust is one of us.
on the run for the library policemen...
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probably with the Spelling Police...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
They are. No sales of stolen property are ever valid. A clueless person who buys stolen property at a thief's yard sale not knowing the seller stole it still is in possession of stolen property. That item can be taken from the unwitting buyer by the police and returned to the rightful owner, the person it was stolen from. If the buyer wants their money back, they have to sue the thief, which is usually a fruitless effort. So, eBay's role is that whenever they realize that property's stolen, they've gotta kill the auction in order to maintain buyer confidence in their marketplace. They don't want transactions that aren't going to work happening over their system, simply because that'd undermine the trust people have in their system.
Just shows how dumb and lazy most criminals are. I sold books on Amazon until 2 years ago, and I was able to get great stuff for virtually nothing jusst be forging ties at the library and getting their discards - plus buying cheaply from other sources. I never paid more than about ten cents per book. Is saving a dime worth going to jail for? (not to mention the moral compromise involved in stealing.)
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That's not what happened in this case though.
Here, he made use of his employee access to the library computer system to say that the book had been returned, when it had not been.
Secondly, I don't think he sold them on Amazon for more than the list price. These are current, in print books that you can get from a bookstore anywhere, including Amazon's new books section.
I would say this is a clear cut case of theft.
For the less age-challenged, the Dano (sic) reference is to Hawaii Five oh. I almost wrote "Mannix", such are the problems of being over the hill. I.E., over 40.
These fines are not there for you to deliberate hold back a book. You should return them. It's a fine, not a price tag, you did't buy them.
I almost fell of my chair laughing as my wife brought me a coffee, Thank god I wasn't drinking it at the time, because my monitor would be a mess right now.
I bet that the possibility of writing really shitty reviews about really shitty books like that only come once in a very great while.
The beauty of self publishing authors is that, once in a very great while someone dissapoints this reader by being as charming and erudite as their subject is pithy, most of the time I am reminded that the value of editors come as much from what they don't publish, and there for spare us from, as how well they do publish what they.
To quote Dorothy Parker: "That's not writing, that's typing."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
does the theft of books from libraries have to do with:
a> Amazon's selling of used books depriving the author's of collecting revenue.
b> Amazon saying that it shouldn't collect state taxes because it gets no police services.
Other than that we want to make an ad-hominem attack on Amazon and Bezos?
Would it change what the thief did if the books showed up on EBay?
I know why Amazon does not want to pay sales tax and its not just the small price difference of the tax or the administrative headaches. The fact is that people really really hate paying taxes to the point of irrationality. I saw the results from an e-commerce study done by MIT on people's on-line spending habits. It showed that a person would rather go with a more expensive online store in order to avoid paying sales tax. In fact, the data suggested that people would pay $5 more for the product to avoid $1 of sales tax.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm sure that Amazon knows that being tax-free means more than it seems when it comes to consumer behavior.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You didn't purchase the books. I'm honestly not sure if it's considered theft. But there are certainly laws that refer to legitimately required copies of materials (some parts of copyright law), and I don't think that this would fit the bill (certainly not if this was done intentionally, and I'm not sure about accidentally). Some of it depends on how your library policy reads- do they drop the situation entirely once the fine is paid?
The library police won't be coming after you because both libraries and the police have better things to do with their time (unless this becomes a regular occurence because people think that paying the fine means they bought the book). Libraries have scarce enough resources as it is.
People not returning books sucks for libraries. The reason fines are so high often isn't because they want the fine to act as a detriment- it's to make sure that they can get as close a replacement as possible to the missing item (which is often impossible in out of print books) and to pay for the cost of processing the book. Processing the book is not as easy as slapping on a tag and making the item available for checkout again. There's cataloging and recataloging involved.
At any rate, libraries are a public service. Taking advantage of their services in the way the article describes, whether or not the person falsely checks in the book, is unethical if nothing else.
Look on the bright side, it's nice to see that people are reading!
Maybe it'd be legal to do this with Blockbuster DVDs. After all, there aren't any late fees with Blockbuster.
Although Bezos claimed that the AG "is the same organization that from time to time has advocated charging public libraries royalties on books they loan out," (from news.com.com)
the A.G. website has a slightly different story. Apparently the A.G. did investigate government-sponsored royalties, but funding issues and higher-priority concerns for the A.G. have halted their efforts.
I find it interesting that the A.G. promotes such a system, described as "...a small government-funded royalty paid to authors of books borrowed from libraries." I mean, how could you determine who gets royalties without keeping track of how many times each item gets checked out? Wouldn't that raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention issues of fraud and checkout-padding for certain books?
And then who gets to put media in the library? I mean I could put together some pamphlets about linux or FOSS, and then give them to my local library to put on the shelf. If my friends and I check them out (for free) every few days, we can get money back, right?
What would we do with websites? People coming into the library are increasingly doing so to access the Internet (especially in lower-income areas where most people do not have access at home). If someone does research online and finds good information on Wikipedia.org, shouldn't Wikipedia get some money for that? Who is to say that Britannica deserves royalties for its 3year-old Encyclopedia but Wikipedia doesn't deserve them for its own upkeep of hardware and bandwidth?
If this happens I can see people forming new "free libraries" -- not free for borrowing, but free from any monitoring or recording of who checked out what, when. I thought up a couple of neat ways to do this a while back as a way to 'get around' terms in the PATRIOT Act -- generally including public/private keypairs and money held in escrow (in the event that the materials were not returned). It would be a shame if people felt forced to go out and implement something like this.
coding is life
I appreicate libraries and don't condone the theft of their resources but... Libraries don't always think through their fines and charges. (or for that matter most rental businesses)
I put it to an elderly University librarian that a $100AU maximum on late fees was stupid when the charge for a lost book was also $100AU. I asked her why she would expect anyone to return a book that hit the maximum fine. Even before the maximum, people might just decide to lump the extra cost and keep the book if the difference between the fine and the replacement charge equals the retail cost.
I pointed out that higher level texts often retailed in the campus bookshop for over $100AU, so the replacement charge seemed even more short sighted. Why didn't their system pull up the real cost of each book to determine it and cap late fees at half the cost individually?
She looked at me like I was evil incarnate.
If it were a fair system, I'd have the option of saying, "No thanks. I don't want to buy the services you are selling." Tax is no different than paying protection money. I'll be physically punished if I decide not to.
The Government is the only body allowed to shoot me 'legally'. And they have nearly all the guns anyway. It's a total racket, and voluntarily paying taxes and pretending that it's the right thing to do is almost entirely an act of denial. The sad truth is that the Government is a sham designed to dull-down, enslave and bleed the populace.
An interesting note. . . In my country, (Canada), one of the biggest personal tax-dodgers (to the tune of millions), is the current prime minister. Hipocricy? You bet. --And nobody has the balls to do anything about it. At the same time, on parliament hill last year a cadre of the highest ranking ministers granted themselves a pay raise putting their take home pay at over $100,000 each. There was no way to vote against this.
People who proudly pay tax are self-deluding chumps who don't want to admit they're being raped.
-FL
As a rule on such jobs I always required a staff member with me at all times and required that my bags (computer, scanner, etc) be inspected at the entrance and the exit. True CYA. The first day I went to inspect the collection it was clear it had been "groomed". Telltall dust lines in drawers that should not have had been openned in years lead to the possiblity many books were missing. I quickly told them I had no interest in stepping into their mess and advised them to call the Boston PD right way.
My guess was someone was grabbing what look valuable and didn't know how to cover their tracks. It was also likely that person was still there.
The sad thing was there were a number of books I would've looked to have copies of, but it never happened.
Atleast some places, like the BLP, has very good security of the rare books. Once you get known as a researcher their they were pretty cool. Still strick, but still cool. Of course this was before the BPL was gutted. I fear in ten years it will a Starbuck's and Border's.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST