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?

[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?

[Bugs42]

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

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?

[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.

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

[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.

Wonder what books they burned...

[setirw]

I'd guess Fahrenheit 451.

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?

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

[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.

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.

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?

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: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.

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.

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.