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.

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:Donate Them or Recycle the Paper

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Yahoo news story I read earlier today about this, he was upset due to no one wanting them if he donated.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070528/ap_on_re_us/bo ok_burning [yahoo.com]

But when he wanted to thin out the collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops; they said they were full.

That is a part of the second paragraph. It appears that the guy tried to give the books to libraries but the ones he attempted to did not want them. I have not seen any mention of which libraries and how many he contacted, but according to this story he tried.

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.

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.

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 [linuxquestions.org]

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:Fuel for the fire?

[Herkum01]

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

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

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. :)