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  • From: <yarrow@sfo.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] book saving
  • Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:04:14 -0800

On Sat, 8 Dec 2007 20:09:42 EST
Marimike6@cs.com wrote:
....> I was there the day before the end of the sale. There

> were still tens of
> thousands of books left. And they were good ones. Many
> like new, many in perfect
> condition, many hard to find.....
>
> Library policy at the end of the sale is to shred what's
> left, turning them
> into mulch. They don't give them away. I think it's
> something about swamping
> the second hand book market....

Maybe not so much that, as the huge problem of what to do
with excess. LIterally -- who will haul them away? All
these Friends of the Library groups need volunteers who can
think creatively and figure out ways to maximize use of the
resources. It's a huge time commitment, though, and at
least once a week you'll have to deal with a box of moldy
books, or books so far from being usable that you wonder
what planet the donors live on. It's also a huge political
morass -- many longtime volunteers who've always done
things one way (the "right" way, of course) and are
incredibly resistant to change.

I volunteer for one of the Friends of the Library groups,
one of the very few in our area that gives away books
considered unsalable -- marked up, not new enough, too
specialized, too esoteric, too far removed from what they
know or are interested in. (In other words, the decisions
are arbitrary.) Most of the "salable" books are priced 50
cents to 2 dollars (a few are more). Book dealers swarm
over the generous selection of free books every day, and
sometimes find "unsalable" books they can sell for $100.

Books that have been on the shelves are taken away after 2
months, and, along with excess free books, sent offsite (to
goodwill -- a semi truck comes to a volunteer's house
monthly and hauls dozens of boxes of books to the next
state, 12-16 hours away). We were not able to find anyone
locally to take the books because every single library is
overwhelmed with donations and has to find a way to manage
them. AFAIK, most groups deal with "unsalable" books by
tossing them (trash or recycling).

After large annual sales, one of the main problems is what
to do with leftover books after the bag sale. In past
years, people took boxes of free books only to return them
to the library within months! To stop that from happening
(because the flow of salable books is overwhelming without
these books that have already been sorted out), for a while
one of the volunteers was marking "rejected" books with a
permanent marker! Before that, one or more of the
volunteers was tearing off the hard covers of books deemed
unsalable -- the official explanation was to make them
recyclable. Book dealers were still able to sell these
damaged books, some for a considerable amount, after other
volunteers fished them out of the trash and reunited books
and covers.

Some of the local libraries have started selling books
online, but again, that's another huge time commitment for
selecting, listing, pricing, returning e-mails, shipping,
etc. None of the volunteers I know have experience in the
book business, and the books that would sell best on the
internet are the ones they are accustomed to culling first,
but they've agreed to start selling online, so it will be
interesting to see if the online-selling project goes
anywhere.

To give some idea of the volume: the bookshop in the
library gets restocked twice a day except on weekends, when
it's only once a day. So that's at least 12 times a week.
When I do it, I usually put out 200 books (sometimes double
that amount). Other people don't load up the book carts
quite as much, or make 2 trips. I'd estimate about 2500
books a week. I also restock the free area (200-400 books
at a time) once a week, but fewer people do that, so maybe
1000-2000 books a week. Another 400-600 or so go offsite
each week (these are the ones that used to get trashed
before some of us fanatic recyclers got involved). And then
varying amounts of moldy, stained, shredded, or other
unusable books are donated, usually boxes at a time. So
4000 to 5000 books a week, every week, sometimes more, get
sorted, priced, and shelved. Every week. Plus an annual
sale of 20K or so books. One of the other local libraries
holds a monthly sale of 50,000 books.




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