As an avid reader and an online book seller, here are some titles that are guaranteed to show up at any book or rummage sale, usually with an uncracked spine and clean, tight pages devoid of fingerprints, food crumbs, etc.
The Shack - Wm. Paul Young
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Paul Farmer
Strengths 2.0 - Tom Rath
A New Earth - Eckard Tolle
Multiple Bles8ings - the Gosselins (yes, really!)
I did read “A Brief History of Time”, and recall reading somewhere that a man printed up some postcards with his address, and stamped them, and placed them in a number of copies of that mega-best-selling Stephen Hawking book, in bookstores, libraries, and resale stores. The postcard also had the message that he would send $5 to anyone who mailed back the postcard with their address on it. You guessed it - he never got any of them back. :smack:
Another one I just thought of was “Going Rogue” by Sarah Palin. The library bookstore I volunteer at gets almost as many copies of this as they do “The Da Vinci Code”. :dubious:
Around 1990, *Spy *magazine did an article on this subject. IIRC, “A Brief History of Time” was ranked second-highest in not being read, behind Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”.
French Economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century was a bestseller. It combed through extensive income and tax data maintained over more than a hundred years to show that in an economic system, r>g (interest > rate of GDP growth) leads to income inequality.
That sounds so cool, they should just have it on the checkout line as an impulse buy, right?
I want to say someone did a Kindle analysis and it was a book where folks stopped very early.
They’re usually read, or at least banged up, as are the “______ for Dummies” or “_____ for Idiots” books.
We recently did a clean-up of our library bookstore due to remodeling, and we found 5 copies of Christine Northrup’s book about menopause scattered throughout. We kept one and sent the rest to Better World Books, a reseller that gives us a cut of the profits. That’s also where our extra copies of “The Da Vinci Code”, etc. go.
Interestingly, we do sell the Chicken Soup, Dummies, and Idiots books.
I hadn’t mentioned the Bible because while I do see them in resale shops and am aware that most people haven’t read it (or all of it, anyway), they generally don’t show up in pristine condition.
Having never heard of this book until now, I Googled it, and they must not have been distributing them in my area. Here’s a hilarious blog entry about it.
Some years back, the disabled child poet Mattie Stepanek was all over the best-seller charts. I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen one of his poetry books anywhere except in a bookstore.
And then there’s “Dianetics”. I’ve heard that it remains a perennial best-seller because Scientologists buy it in large numbers, and then send them back to the publisher where they get shipped out again, etc. :rolleyes:
Many many moons ago I worked in a bookstore. One Christmas, we sold hundreds of copies of “The Gulag Archipelago” as THE Christmas gift book of the year. By the end of January, 300 of those books had been returned, unread.
It was highly marketed as an excellent Christmas choice, and many people purchasing last minute Christmas gifts or gifts for people they don’t know well tend to choose a nice book on the best seller’s list, without knowing or caring what it might actually be about.
So I’d say it was a marketing fail, rather than a failure by the author or the book itself.
FWIW, I read all three of the Gulag books and was absolutely riveted. But I wouldn’t have recommended them to most casual readers.
Damfino, I’m thinking it was either 1973 or 1974, if I recall correctly. Definitely in that window.
Someone gave me a copy of The Shack. I knew nothing about it, so I tried to read it. Utter glurge and I refused to pass it along as suggested. It ended up holding up a window and got rain soaked and ruined. I shed no tears for that literary loss.
I curate a used-book library at my church which takes up a full room, with decent turnover. I’ve never seen Mountains Beyond Mountains, Strengths 2.0, A New Earth, Multiple Bles8ings, Going Rogue, Wild Animus, Dianetics, or The Satanic Verses (though I think we did get something else by Rushdie). Now, some of those are doubtless selected against by the demographics of a fairly liberal Catholic church, but I question the premise of others.
That’s also where our extra copies of “The Da Vinci Code”, etc. go.
(Don’t worry, it’s SFW.)