Bookstore Owner Burns Books 371
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.
Fahrenheit 451? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ray Bradbury
PR stunt (Score:3, Insightful)
Books are re-usable commodities. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Donate Them or Recycle the Paper (Score:5, Insightful)
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:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ?
Ok, maybe a little extreme.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:won't RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
First thing I thought of (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ?
aaargh! reference yes, literature no (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Book sales (Score:3, Insightful)
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;
- 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.)
- The bookseller buys a lot of books on a topic currently 'hot', which subsequently cools
- 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.
Re:won't RTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Completely Offtopic: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.