Bookstore Owner Burns Books

Several readers sent us links to an AP story about a pair of Kansas City booksellers who staged a book bonfire, claiming to protest declining literacy. The story doesn't convey a sure sense of the booksellers' motives for what could, in fact, be a PR stunt or a subtle act of extortion against book lovers — it does mention that people were buying books out of the piles awaiting immolation. The bookstore's own site tries to sound sincere, but it offers visitors a chance to save books from the flames for $1 each plus postage.

Comments

So what?

[Reality Master 101]

If no one else has noticed, the world is AWASH in books. Technology has made book production so cheap that any idiot can publish a book.

Come to think of it, maybe this guy is onto something. With the price of firewood so high, maybe I can get a bunch of used books for less money to burn.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

i just got done righting a book you insensitive moran

Re:So what?

[daviddennis]

I think he's trying to take advantage of readers' affection for books. You could see that in the article, where a good number of people "adopted" them for $1 each.

But that's interesting because it proves his original point wrong, no? There are many people who care about books.

On the other hand, his article got mentioned on Slashdot and now everyone knows where to go for $1 books if they happen to live in his area. So it might be a brilliant publicity stunt that's worth about $20,000 ($1 x 20,000 books) to him.

D

Re:So what?

[QRDeNameland]

FWIW, I know a couple who have an internet bookselling business. They started in the used book business years ago, pre-Web, selling rare and collectible books. The main way they procured a lot of their books were through estate sales, and usually ended up with large amounts of books that were of no value to them.

When the Web came around, they started doing a bit of business in the collectible books, but they soon found that there was a far larger market for the "garbage" books at $3-5 a book, and they since set up a warehouse with a bar code system and soon that became the primary focus of their business. They still sell rare books but more out of passion than for the money.

They own a Lamborghini Countach, so I assume they're doing pretty good at it. Just an anecdote, I know, but a counterpoint to the argument that no one wants the "garbage" books.

Re:So what?

[morcego]

I think he's trying to take advantage of readers' affection for books. You could see that in the article, where a good number of people "adopted" them for $1 each.

So it might be a brilliant publicity stunt that's worth about $20,000 ($1 x 20,000 books) to him.

I agree it is a publicity stunt. At the same time he is buying worthless (to him) books, he is selling signed copies of Harry Potter (literary garbage, even if it has entertaining values).

Is he worried about literacy ? Let him burn high profile, expensive books that have low literary value, like his "The Da Vinci Code Advance Reading Copy" or his signed "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets".

Actually, if you consider storage space costs money, it is very likely that he is saving money by burning these books.

He also says for people to buy and donate the books to promote literacy (or some crap like that). Well, why is he burning the books instead of donating them ? Well, lets review:

1) Publicity
2) Saving storage space
3) Getting people to "adopt" some of these books

Which translates to:

1) Profit
2) Money saving
3) Profit

Not a bad deal, hum ?

Re:So what?

[phalse phace]

"i just got done righting a book you insensitive moran"

Really? What was wrong with it?

Re:So what?

[heinousjay]

Yes, that was the joke. Also moran, to further grind it into the dirt. It's dead. Happy now?

Re:So what?

[Bugs42]

i just got done righting a book you insensitive moran My last name is Moran, you insensitive clod!

Re:So what?

[Reality Master 101]

he is selling signed copies of Harry Potter (literary garbage, even if it has entertaining values).

That's what the "cognoscenti" said about Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Oz, and [name your classic children's book]. The Harry Potter is destined to become a classic. They might not please the intellectual elite, but their incredible depth and breadth of plot along with its self-consistent world is an amazing achievement. And if you think they're shallow, as many do, then I respectfully submit that you need to ead them again with a more careful eye. The most amazing thing about these books is that a seven year old can read them for just the surface adventure, but an adult reader can read them for the extremely subtle plot questions (see the various fan sites for innumerable essays on the open questions).

Re:So what?

[morcego]

Why should I hate it ? I actually read all the books, and got them for my daughter.
They have both entertaining and intellectual value. They just don't have literary value.

Re:So what?

[morcego]

I've read them, read the sites, and even gave the (current) collection for my daughter. They have some intellectual value, and great entertainment properties.

As far as literary value is concerned, they have almost as much as a Spiderman comic book, which I do love, and still think has no literary value.

So you point is what exactly ? That every good book has good literary value ?

Re:So what?

[Arancaytar]

My last name is Clod, you insensitive... agh, forget it.

Re:So what?

[morcego]

Is that simply a function of how complex the grammar is?

No.

Does Lord of the Rings, one of the most horrendously written classics ever created, qualify as having literary value?

Nope. Great book, tho. Read it 7 time already, in 2 languages.

Wizard of Oz? Or heck, how about anything by Charles Dickens, who was immensely popular, but generally regarded as having no literary value in his time?

I have to admit never reading Wizard of Oz (only saw the movie). And I dislike Dickens, so I'm biased there.

As far as I can tell, the difference between literature and non-literature is the date on the book. If it passes the test of time, then it's considered classic literature.

You are correct as far as "classic" goes.

I don't know about anybody else, but there's no doubt in my mind that 100 years from now, HP will still be around as classic literature.

It sure will be a classic. No doubt about that. Heck, some people already consider Mists of Avalon a classic.

Ok, not for the big question:

So how do you define "literary" value?

Literary is a complex classification, so I'll explain my PoV in two parts. First by explanation, then by giving some examples. Please, bear with me.

A literary work first must have intrinsic artistic value. Then, it must have intellectual value. Then, it must be creative. Entertainment value doesn't enter the picture here, as far as I'm concerned (from what I've seen).

For my examples, I'll try to pick, probably without much success, some non controversial names.

Some good books with poor literary value:
- Any good technical book
- Harry Potter (controversial, but already stated)
- Lord of the Rings (boy, you guys are going to kill me)
- 1984
- Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Some good literary works, but poor books:
- The Lusiads (name 1 person who actually enjoyed the book)
- Midnight Summer Dreams (not a book, but a play, so it can't be a good book)
- Most of Shakespeare work (for the same reason)
- Anything by Dostoevsky

Some good literary works that are also good books:
- Brave New World
- Dracula
- Frankenstein
- The Three Musketeers
- Mobydick (which I actually didn't enjoy)

Bad literary works and bad books:
- Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol) [Worst book ever, as far as I'm concerned]

Time is only a factor if you consider "surviving the test of time", which is usually the case. Since I don't think it is always the case (many good books and authors end up forgotten, for whatever reasons), I didn't list it before. But it is a valid clue.

I hope this helps to clarify my point of view, even if you don't agree with me (not my intention to convince anyone).

Re:So what?

[Rabbit Time!]

Erm...what? This whole set of opinions is, in my opinion, pretty off the mark. Apparently Shakespeare isn't entertaining (have you counted the number of raunchy jokes in his comedies?), Dostoevsky writes 'poor books' (those are fabulously well-constructed, nuanced works, and not usually a terrible slog to read, either), 1984 has no literary value, but Dracula and Frankenstein do. Oh, and plays have no literary value because they're not 'books.' Ack! I tend to say that with books, there is candy and there is steak. Tom Robbins? Candy. Harry Potter? Candy. Lord of the Rings is totally candy. Does this mean you shouldn't read them? No. Does this make them less worthy of existence? No. Should your diet consist only of candy? Emphatically no. Sometimes you have to read stuff that's only for fun, especially if you tend to read a lot of dense books, you need a break...but you need some sort of nutrition in your diet too. Now Joan Collins? That's simply crap, and you should probably stay away from that sort of thing. :-) I agree with you on disliking Dickens, though. Didn't surprise me a bit when I found out he often got paid a penny a work. Great stories, but I cannot stand to read them. Lots of people love them, though, so maybe I'm missing something. Also, that would be 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and its Shakespeare, so it probably shouldn't be listed separately.

Re:So what?

[The One and Only]

No. There's a fine distinction between writing an entertaining or interesting book and writing a book that has literary merit, just as there's a difference between an entertaining film or a film that has artistic merit. Generally, the distinction hinges upon the work's amenability to literary analysis and evaluation--a novel can be deeply entertaining while having shallow, flat characters and saying nothing beyond a reaffirmation of the author's political biases (most Tom Clancy novels) or a novel can be a deep and insightful exploration of the human condition, capturing strong and sophisticated characters (most of Dickens' work).

Re:So what?

[Awel]

A literary work first must have intrinsic artistic value. Then, it must have intellectual value. Then, it must be creative. Entertainment value doesn't enter the picture here, as far as I'm concerned (from what I've seen). Have you read C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism ? He argues (in his capacity as literary don rather than as Christian apologist) that there is such thing as a literary or unliterary book, but only literary or unliterary readers. The literary reader reads and re-reads for the joy of immersion in the world of the book, for the language of the descriptions and to meet again the characters, and mulls over the book afterwards. The unliterary reader reads simply to find out what happens next. Thus a good book is one which rewards the first sort of reading, which still has benefit on second and subsequent readings, while poor books, once their plot is discovered, hold nothing more out to the reader.

'Intrinsic artistic value', inasmuch as it means anything at all, means that it is capable of moving people, changing them; and that people like the experience. And entertainment is, must be, part of this.

Re:So what?

[Abcd1234]

Dickens has some interesting turns of phrase, which I guess make him a good writer to some people, but his books, like many "classics" are extremely difficult to wade through without a cattle prod (like grades) forcing you to do it.

Funny. I just finished David Copperfield, having never before read Dickens, and found it incredibly entertaining, well paced read. Great characters, wonderful use of the english language, an interesting and involved plot... in fact, I rank it as one of the best books I've ever read.

Maybe I just got lucky?

won't RTFA

[digitalderbs]

I couldn't be bothered to read TFA... what's this about?

Re:won't RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Disposal issues with legacy media platforms.

Re:won't RTFA

[setirw]

lol i dunno sumting abot pore liturcy in the us lol!!1

Re:won't RTFA

[__aaclcg7560]

Firefighters are underemployed as there are fewer books to burn these days.

Re:won't RTFA

[aldheorte]

This is both insightful and funny. Within the next couple decades, books may become antiques. They really are legacy media platforms. I actually like reading a book better than reading on a computer, but two things:

1. I'm dated. I grew up reading books on paper, pre-Internet. This is not true of new generations. I had a vertigo moment the other day when I was on a train and I heard a young girl who was maybe eight years old telling her grandmother, with full confidence, of information she had found on this and that web site. There was no awe in her voice, this was all very matter of fact. In her world view, the Internet was simply an assumed platform, not something new. There are cognitively mature people alive today who have never known the Internet NOT to exist.
2. Surely within the next couple decades electronic book reading technology will get parity on heft, size of screen, resolution, and outdoor viewing.

I think I'll go read a book now for old times' sake.

Re:won't RTFA

[shutdown -p now]

Surely within the next couple decades electronic book reading technology will get parity on heft, size of screen, resolution, and outdoor viewing.

More like in a year or two, actually. The existing eInk/ePaper readers are almost there - 200dpi, size of an average pocket book, and readable in sunlight. The only problem is the contrast, the background on present model is still somewhat greyish compared to good paper. But they've already shown the prototype screens which are of a much brighter white, just as good as a new book. These are supposed to be used in production models within a year at most. Fragility issues should be dealt when they move to plastic screens (again, promised in a year or so). Price is still restrictive for a single-purpose device, though, with low-end eInk models at $300 - that might take a few more years to go down.

Re:won't RTFA

[SadGeekHermit]

Some guy has a used bookstore in Kansas City. This bookstore has a small warehouse area for storing used books he's bought but hasn't sold yet.

His bookstore doesn't sell as many books as he would like, and he is taking in more books than he is selling. He wanted to get rid of some of his backlog of books, by taking them to other bookstores and libraries and such, but none of them wanted his books (they probably had their own backlogs and stock to deal with).

He flipped his wig and started throwing them into a huge cauldron, burning them. He announced that people could "adopt" them for a buck apiece, and save them from the fire, in a ghastly "Give me a dollar or the book gets it!" kind of thingy.

Because our culture is relatively horrified by the idea of book burning, seeing as how it is tied directly to certain extremely evil periods in the past, and totalitarianism, and censorship, he came up with a delightfully nutty excuse for his bonfire. Specifically, he said that his bonfire was a protest against illiteracy, amazing when books like Farenheit 451 were about how book-burning were all about FORCED illiteracy.

He made some stock complaints about how estate sales usually had five TV's and three books, blah blah blah, and threw some more books on the fire.

Then the fire department got fed up with the mess and put it out, telling him to knock it off and get a permit next time (of course, when he asks for a permit, they're going to deny it for some logistical reason, so no more book burning for him!).

I think that about wraps it up.

Short version: Ding Bat Goes Bananas Burns Books Annoys Fire Department Gets 15 Minutes of Fame and is Promptly Forgotten.

Re:won't RTFA

[i.r.id10t]

If you are a fast reader, you could start by burning one of the covers, which would give you enough light to get 3 or 4 pages in. At which point, you don't *need* them any longer, so you burn one of them to read the next 3 or 4... heck, you could probably finish a decent book by the time you got done iwht the covers, table of content, prologue (who reads that anyway?), etc. :)

Wonder what books they burned...

[setirw]

I'd guess Fahrenheit 451.

Re:Wonder what books they burned...

[SEMW]

No self-respecting nerd/geek should miss this reference to the classic http://www.amazon.com/Fahrenheit-451-Ray-Bradbury/ dp/0345342968/ Maybe, but this is the 21st Century; no "self-respecting nerd/geek" would refer to "Fahrenheit 451"! -- Now, "Celsius 233", maybe.

Or, better still, "Kelvin 506".

"T_Planck 3.57*10^-30"?

;-)

Fahrenheit 451?

[PoliTech]

"Nobody listens any more. . . . . . I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense."

Ray Bradbury

Burn 'em all, move on to ebooks.

[Tatisimo]

I've been reading mostly ebooks for a while. They can be read on a cell phone, on a pc, on a PDA, and anything that can read ASCII or PDF and are sure easier to carry than normal paper books. Seeing that I now measure my reading habits in megabytes instead of pages, I think it's pretty unintelligent to say that because books are being sold less literacy is declining.

Re:Burn 'em all, move on to ebooks.

[bladesjester]

I tend to favor paper books. They're easier on my eyes, I can read them whether there's electricity or not, plus there's something to be said for tactile and scent memory being linked to information.

Granted, I keep copies of most of my reference books in electronic format, but they generally only get used if I'm away somewhere with my laptop.

PR stunt

[Aminion]

Because you cannot just give the damn books away, right? Heck, recycling the books at part of a PR stunt would be better than burning them.

Re:PR stunt

[jd]

My understanding from the article is that he did try to give them away but nobody would take them. Which, if true, is indeed a sad reflection on our times. That this is occurring at the same time the Hay on Wye Festival is taking place (one of the largest and most important literary festivals, in a town where you can't move for book stores) makes it positively sick and twisted.

Hell, why didn't he just ship the books to Hay? I'm sure they have room for Yet Another bookstore - there must be something there they can convert. A cafe or a pub, perhaps. (Anyone going there goes for one reason and one reason alone, and it ain't the food.) The idea that he couldn't give the books away is all fine and dandy, but is clear evidence of not trying very hard.

(There are even anonymous book clubs, where you go online and list all the places you've hidden books, and other members can go find them. Apparently, it's not just information but entire books that like to be free.)

Re:PR stunt

[Dun Malg]

My understanding from the article is that he did try to give them away but nobody would take them. Which, if true, is indeed a sad reflection on our times. That this is occurring at the same time the Hay on Wye Festival is taking place (one of the largest and most important literary festivals, in a town where you can't move for book stores) makes it positively sick and twisted. Some books are literally not worth the paper they're printed on. Like "a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910", for a specific example from TFA. Saving books just because they're printed words bound into a cover is overly reverent of print for print's sake. How about saving every newspaper ever printed? Magazines? Catalogs? Monumental stacks of how-to books for defunct software (Lotus 1-2-3 for Dummies [DOS])? Where do you draw the line?

Triad of Inquisition

[MSTCrow5429]

I read about this earlier, and have three questions: 1) Is this a sincere protest about a supposed lack of reading among the US population? Millions of new unsold books are pulped each year, so this just sounds illogical. or 2) Is this a bizarre marketing ploy? and 3) Is there a list of which books you can "save" for a dollar each? Can you select them? How much is shipping and handling? Enough to turn "saved" into "positive profit margin," I suspect.

Re:Triad of Inquisition

[zeroduck]

Theres a great way to save old books--BookMooch. People list their unwanted books to give away to other users of the website. It's pretty simple--list your books for 1/10th point each, receive 1 point for giving a book away, and spend 1 point to get a book from another member.

...and thats my pimping BookMooch speech.

I'd doubt that there is enough profit at $1 a book to organize and store the books--you're talking about a lot of books. Most older books just don't have much of a market value; I assure you that nothing you would want to read was destroyed (although, I still cringe on the thought of burning books).

Did he buy his carbon offsets?

[Ngarrang]

Did he buy his carbon offsets for the burning of these books?

Note the paragraph halfway thru the story...

[tcopeland]

...that is:

> The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the
> Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne
> didn't have a permit for burning.

So, Bob's your uncle.

Books are re-usable commodities.

[Vellmont]

Especially the extremely popular titles he has listed on his website. Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code? Sheesh, those books are so common they aren't worth the paper they're printed on. It's no loss if he burns them.

The thing is that the vast majority of books become useless once you've read them. Especially mass market fiction like Da Vinci and Potter. No one wants them because everyone that wanted to read them has, so there's an enormous surplus. With sights like Amazon.com selling books like these essentially for shipping charges, why would buy them at a brick-and-mortar? It's cheaper and easier to just pull up Amazon, click 3-4 times and wait a week. Most of the time you're buying from a used bookstore just like this guy with a surplus of that book and just wants to get rid of it and make a dollar on the shipping.

Re:Books are re-usable commodities.

[samwichse]

Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code

Now there is a book I'd like to read!

Sam

Donate Them or Recycle the Paper

[NeverVotedBush]

What an idiot. He could donate them to libraries, schools, prisons, whatever. He could also just recycle the paper. Burning them pollutes and adds to the CO2 loading. I hope someone from the EPA will be there to slap him with some nice fines for smoke and such and someone from the fire department to nail him if he doesn't have proper safeguards in place.

Some of the big box chains (Borders, Barnes & Noble) could be why his sales are down. Same for Amazon.

Personally, I think it's a publicity stunt.

Re:Donate Them or Recycle the Paper

[Osty]

What an idiot. He could donate them to libraries, schools, prisons, whatever. He could also just recycle the paper. Burning them pollutes and adds to the CO2 loading. I hope someone from the EPA will be there to slap him with some nice fines for smoke and such and someone from the fire department to nail him if he doesn't have proper safeguards in place.

Way to RTFA! He did try donating them, I assume to local libraries, schools, thrift shops, etc. Nobody wanted them. And then when he tried to burn them, the fire department put out his bonfire after 50 minutes because he didn't have a permit.

As for the additional CO2 from burning 20,000 books (he didn't actually burn 20,000 at once, but probably just a few hundred -- the article claim he intends to have monthly bonfires until the books are all gone), I doubt it's really going to add all that much CO2 into the atmosphere. What CO2 it does add will be relatively localized, and disperse pretty quickly.

If you want to be concerned about a by-product of the burning, worry about releasing all of the chemicals in paper that are added to make it last longer. Burning a book is quite a bit dirtier than burning some cut firewood, even if they do release the same amount of CO2.

Re:Donate Them or Recycle the Paper

[shalla]

I'm a librarian. Having worked at several libraries in different states (and in very different socioeconomic climates), I can address the book donation issue.

Book donations can be both helpful to libraries or a really big drain on time and resources. Occasionally, someone donates a rare book, or a book we find we need or want, or one we've been trying to get. More often, though, by the time people donate copies of a book, the library has purchased, catalogued, and processed (put all the stickers and security items, etc. on the book) copies of that book already. Unless the library's copy is missing or in very poor condition, it doesn't make sense to take the staff time and use the extra processing materials it would take to add an extra copy that probably won't circulate much. (If 50 people are going to check out a certain book, and the library already has a sufficient number of copies to meet that demand, adding another copy isn't doing anything except taking up often precious shelf space. It doesn't mean more people get to take out the book.)

All that, of course, is assuming the book is in mint condition. While you were a good citizen and donated books in good condition, other people try to use libraries as a dumping ground. I've seen books covered in cat urine, mold, food, and some things we couldn't even identify that were given to libraries. My old library had to contract with someone to come and haul away the books that couldn't even be sold at the book sale. Sometimes they had to call and ask for a special pick up, because the items were making us sick. And sometimes, people donated items that no library would add and no one ever wanted to buy, like encyclopedia sets from 1972 or health textbooks from 1980.

Keep in mind that every item donated requires someone to look at it and make a decision. That's taking the time of someone who has to know the library collection and the reading patterns of the patrons pretty well. Many libraries no longer accept donations to put in the collection simply because they were not cost effective--paying a staff member (in large libraries, volunteers often do not know the collection well enough) to sort through the dross was costing more than the library was saving through the addition of the few books it found worth adding. Some accept them only for sale in book sales or book stores because then they only have to weed out the completely unacceptable donations, which requires no knowledge of the library collection, just common sense.

So if a beautiful book you donate to the library ends up in a book sale, please don't be upset. Chances are it finds a good home with someone who enjoys it for years to come, and the library gets money it needs to buy needed materials. It may not be quite the way you envisioned it, but many times, the library is actually getting more value from using your book this way.

Anyways, I hope my explanation helped explain why some libraries might not accept donations (especially in bulk from a store owner), or why donations might end up in a book sale rather than on a library shelf. Please know that we DO appreciate the people who donate their books in good condition to the library, and in a perfect world we'd like to put them all on the shelf, but we lack the time, space, and materials to do so, so instead we do the best we can.

As to the book store owner who tried to donate all his extra stock to libraries and was upset when they wouldn't take them, I'd like to repeat that libraries are not a dumping ground. We don't need 150 copies of The Da Vinci Code any more than you do. We have our copies already, and we're not going to have any more luck selling those copies at book sales than you had. Essentially, he overestimated how many copies he could sell and ended up with stock problems which he is blaming on society, and when he couldn't make nonprofits fix the problem for him, he came up with a way to make it a marketing campaign. I don't really have much sympathy for him.

p.s. If you want t

Book sales

[Etherwalk]

Book sales aren't decreasing, they're slowly increasing--generally 1% a year or above, I think. What's happening is the same thing that's happening in the rest of our markets: a few major superstore chains are muscling out the middle guys. The dynamics of the market are changing, too--as with video, the post popular works are sucking up a larger and larger percentage of buyers, while mid-list titles are losing market-share. More mid-list books are being published than used to be, I think, though some publishing houses are cutting back--but it's much harder for a mid-list book to gain a devoted readership, because big chains require publishers to pay them promotion fees for things like book placement near the counter, whereas independent stores would put interesting things or things they thought would sell near the counter, and that included mid-list books without the same advertising budget. The cost of advertising/marketing/promotion as a percentage of book sales has also skyrocketed, while the royalties paid to authors who actually write the books haven't kept up with inflation.

Also, the profit margin on in the publishing industry is relatively small. (I want to say around 7%, but that could be wrong, and of course it varies somewhat by publishing house.) For booksellers, I'm not sure--a very large percentage of a book's sale at list price is above what the bookseller paid for it, but I don't know how overhead and employee salaries figure into the equation.

That being said, while book sales are increasing (and have almost every year since we started keeping track of them), the amount of time we spend reading has started to decrease drastically. (Look up the NEA "Reading at Risk" study.) Similarly, the breadth (and I believe quantity) of books ordered by library collections has decreased. And the budgets of educational libraries are increasingly being swallowed up by effectively monopolistic journal publishers.

Re:Book sales

[ushering05401]

Hardcover sales are comping well. Paperbacks are generally not. Large chain profit margin on HC/CL (hardcover) >= 40%.

I guarantee you, though, the major chains are not doing well. See my post elsewhere in this thread. Borders just rolled their entire upper management over AGAIN, began plans to spin off all international operations, and is closing 50% of the Waldenbooks & BX branded stores.

Getting to be a revolving door in Ann Arbor, and with good reason.

Regards.

Re:Book sales

[DerekLyons]

IANA(U&R)BABIUTBO. (I Am Not A (Used & Rare) Bookseller Anymore But I Used To Be One.)
 

Book sales aren't decreasing, they're slowly increasing--generally 1% a year or above, I think. What's happening is the same thing that's happening in the rest of our markets: a few major superstore chains are muscling out the middle guys.

Which pretty much has nothing to do with Prospero's - as it is a used and rare bookstore.
 
In the used & rare market, the bricks and mortar specialist has been slowly driven out by the garage operator. I.E., somebody who knows little to nothing about books but sells them in great volume on eBay and bookselling services like Alibris, Amazon, and ABE. (If you want to mourn the loss of something - mourn the loss of the professional bookseller.)
 
Now, as to why he has 20,00 extra books - I'd wager it's his own damm fault. You can accumulate excess by a variety of routes;

1. The bookseller buys a box of books when he only wants a few of them. (Either because the seller will only sell the box entire, or the bookseller wants to disguise his interest in a particular books or books.)
2. The bookseller buys a lot of books on a topic currently 'hot', which subsequently cools
3. The bookseller buys books which he thinks are or will be valuable or interesting to his customer, which turn out not to be.

Etc... etc... (I've seen these, and more many times.)
 
Slowly but surely these books accumulate on the shelves or in storage until they choke the store - and then the owner is faced with the problem of getting rid of a huge bolus of books that nobody will take. Had he been smart, he'd have been reevaluating his collection on a regular basis and getting rid of the dogs in small lots over time. The same organizations that won't take take 20,000 books as a single slug with gladly take 100,000 books - 20 at a time over years.

Dont know about B&N...

[ushering05401]

but my lady worked @ BGI (Borders/Waldenbooks/Brentanos/Paperchase) for almost ten years, but recently left. The company is in dire straights even though they also sell multimedia.

While many adults buy plenty of product, there is apparently a large decline in teens buying the latest album or DVD box-set.

Hmmmm. I bet all those kids are legally paying for their multimedia on Amazon and E-Bay... wait... no I don't.

Either way, burning books is stupid.

Regards.

P.S. Apparently you will see Borders diversifying heavily over the next couple years. They have already slated 1/2 of the Waldenbook operations for closure even though they are marginally profitable. Apparently not having floor space to diversify into higher tech stock was the death knell for those stores. There is even a rumor of download kiosks & cell phone kiosks slated for test markets. *ROFL* There was a rumor of a partnership w/B&N floating around earlier this year.

Send'em to Iraq...

[ibn_khaldun]

There are a whole lot of libraries (or what's left of them) in Iraq that got burned involunarily in the "stuff happens" period following the U.S. invasion that would probably love to have a bunch of material in English -- "I for one welcome our new English-speaking overlords" -- and if this guy wants to make a statement, why not just load all of the stuff in a cargo container and ship it over there?

I've actually been to this place. Unlike most /.-ers, I live in the benighted state of Kansas and this place is just two blocks from the University of Kansas Medical Center, where I've spent more time than I would have liked... It's quite a groovy little bookstore -- reminds me a lot of City Lights in San Francisco. Yes, even in Kansas we know about things like City Lights. We also walk on two legs, but only because the Chinese invented the wheelborrow. About 4,000 years after Creation.

In principle, it is a bookstore well worth supporting. But in light of all of the folks in the world who would love to use these books to improve their English, this book-burning gesture seems misguided. To say nothing of reinforcing the view of Kansans as more or less like Neanderthals, but with less intellectual sophistication. Though truth be told, this bookstore is a full 50 meters on the Missouri side of the state line, so don't blame Kansas. Please. Now excuse me while I go club something for dinner.

Neither original, nor even persuasive.

[ScentCone]

This little spectacle isn't even CLOSE to the "send money or I'll kill and eat this cute bunny" web site. Books? Pah! Warm and fuzzy -> Hassenpfeffer: true drama.

Re:Woah, wait a minute

[Technician]

Why don't they burn radios or TVs instead?

They do when their favorite content is pulled.

http://digg.com/celebrity/People_Smash_XM_Receiver s_in_Response_to_Opie_Anthony_Suspension

Sounds cool.

[rampant mac]

...who staged a book bonfire, claiming to protest declining literacy.

Yeah, that helps. I'm going to shoot some people and scream at the top of my lungs about gun safety.

Es brennt!

Fuel for the fire?

[fahrbot-bot]

...but it offers visitors a chance to save books from the flames for $1 each plus postage...

How much to donate books? I can get my hands on few by Ann Coulter :-)

Re:Fuel for the fire?

[Herkum01]

Why not skip to the source and just burn Ann Coulter?

Ok, maybe a little extreme....

[Nemus]

But I really think this guy should be shot. Not in the head or anything, but maybe in the leg or arm or hand: someplace he'll remember. Oh, poor baby can't give the books away? There are schools and libraries the world over, Goodwills and Salvation Armies, etc., that would love to have some if not all of these books.

No, this guy just wants to generate more sales, and to do so in the most inhumane, barbaric, evil way possible. People who burn books are disguisting, and honestly, if I lived in this area, the thought of a book store owner, of all people, who was willing to burn a book, would ensure that I would never, ever, ever purchase anything at his establishment ever again. Burning any book, good or bad, whether you approve of it or not, is a crime against humanity; it is a violation against the essence of human genius, creativity, and generation, be it hate speech or a widely acclaimed work of art (hell, even a Tom Clancy novel). And for a book store owner, whom one would assume would be a bibliophile, to do this, is monstrous. Like I said: shoot him.

First thing I thought of

[CompMD]

was Greensburg, KS. You know, that city that got wiped off the face of the earth a few weeks ago by an F5 tornado? The citizens are trying to rebuild, but they have nothing. Here's a perfect example of people in need of books, and this guy who is a few hours drive away burns them. What a waste.

I have written a thoughtful letter to the bookstore asking that instead of staging another burning, that he look around the Kansas City area to find an organization that would haul the books away to Greensburg to help them out. I live in Kansas, and when I get a few free days, I'd be more than happy to load up my station wagon with books and drive them down to Greensburg.

I heard of a French wine boycott a few years ago..

[jrutley]

where they BOUGHT a whole bunch of French wine and poured it down the sewers. This book burning seems about as smart to me as that.

Re:Probably

[TheMeuge]

I'm sorry, but anyone who puts "Das Kapital" into the same stack as "Dianetics" might as well have a "idiot, and proud" tatoo on his forehead.

Re:Completely Offtopic:

[12ahead]

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Insensitive_cl od

Question 27

[Sage Gaspar]

What is the best title for the preceding post?
a. Re:won't RTFA
b. Wooden Food
c. Fighting Fires with Books
d. Fahrenheit 824291
e. The Cowboy Neal Code

Re:I heard of a French wine boycott a few years ag

[iggymanz]

and thereafter the sewer had a nutty, currant and chocolate bouquet while still expressing a good turdy nose.

Re:Completely Offtopic:

[cooley]

I wouldn't say the line "originates" in Calvin and Hobbes; Mad Magazine (Dave Berg, specifically) used this line back in the seventies. No, I have no cites.

Re:Probably

[loganrapp]

With you even though I didn't care for it.

I mean, it's one thing to deal with Dan Brown - a hack who clearly wrote a novel through his publisher's marketing team - but another to deal with the thoughts of Karl Marx, whether those thoughts are trash or treasure in your mind.

aaargh! reference yes, literature no

[misanthrope101]

Yes, just about all reference books can be electronic, so they can be searched quickly. You MAY still want a paper copy so you have static info--governments like to retroactively edit the past, you know. How many times have we changed the meaning of "unemployment" now?

But I'm skeptical that computers/electronics will take much of literature-reading from books. Books are cheap to the point of being disposable. I have books that I picked up used and I've had for 20 years--economically, they're worth nothing. But as far as the experience of reading, they beat my Macbook or the Palm Tungstem I used to have. I have read a couple of long books on a Palm, and even with a good screen it still isn't that great. The battery life, fragility, cost factor, all affect your experience. If I leave a book on a train I'm out $20 (sometimes a lot less, down to less than $1 for used books), and I've lost just one book. If I'd lost my Tungsten I'd be out $350, and even with all my ebooks backed up and in non-DRM formats so I could easily replace them, it still takes work and time to get another unit and upload all the software and files.

I love tech as much as the next guy. But old-fashioned books are not going to go away with just a few more technological advances. I just moved into a new house, and no, I didn't like unpacking ~2K books, but a thumbdrive full of pdfs isn't a good enough replacement, no matter how good the screen or how long the battery life.

Now, music and movies, yes--to me, music cds are just wasted space, and I don't feel much differently about movie dvds. I'd much prefer a HD full of mp3s (or ogg files, whatever) to a large CD collection.

eBooks won't catch on until...

[Solandri]

eBooks won't catch on until they lose the DRM, or come up with a DRM that's standard and compatible across most platforms and transparent to most users. Right now the publishing industry is absolutely mortified that what happend to the RIAA is going to happen to them, and they're keeping a tight stranglehold on nearly all books published in electronic format. As long as the DRM makes you lose your books if you upgrade or the eBook breaks down, people aren't going to want it. The publishers also need to come back down to reality and start pricing them for less than regular books, not more.

Long-term they will take over primarily because you can store an entire library in a unit the size of a single paperback. But the publishers need to accept progress, otherwise the market is going to be dominated by pirated books that have simply been scanned, OCR'ed, and shared via P2P.

what's garbage?

[misanthrope101]

That's the salient question--what counts as garbage? HP Lovecraft was a pulp writer, but certain rarer editions of his go for over $100 on Ebay. That I don't want it may qualify it as garbage to me, but someone keeps buying Michael Jordan commemorative retrospectives and simular stuff. The Left Behind series, which is artistically horrible and even biblically unsound, sold a bajillion copies.

I personally like to hunt down hardback copies of books I like, even books I already own. A hardback set (with dustjackets intact) of the 1981 Random House edition of Proust might be garbage to some, because it isn't a first edition and isn't an investment, but I paid over twice what a new paperback set costs. Want a hardback edition of Finnegans Wake? How about a single-volume India-Paper edition of Shakespeare's works, with dustjacket? Hardback editions (Everyman's Library doesn't count) of all the Dostoevsky works translated by Pevear/Volokonsky? None of these are financially valuable, so they probably fall into the "garbage" category to anyone looking at books as a business, but as a reader, well, I love that stuff, and I'm willing to pay for it. I love sites like addall.com. There is still money in books, but small bookstores who expect to be able to charge cover price for new release bestsellers are going to falter.

Re:Completely Offtopic:

[foobsr]

see also ... http://www.biocrawler.com/encyclopedia/Slashdot_su bculture#You_insensitive_clod.21

However, the earliest known use of the expression is in Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer-winning 1928 play, Strange Interlude, in which Edmund Darrell describes his son as, "an insensitive clod".

CC.