Yeah, whatever. I repeat, what is this sentence supposed to mean?
I repeat, in paraphrase: It would behoove you to read the entirity of my posts–You will find the answer to your query therein. Capitalized and everything.
I’ve never had the pleasure to go in a Half Price Books. But I don’t have to. I don’t have to go to the Brattle Book Shop in Boston either to know that a large selection of better and rare used books is not the same thing as a pile of used bestsellers in a yard sale. Or that an extremely large store has an economy of scale that cannot be matched by those in thrift shop or those storefronts that carry bunches of paperbacks (and not trade paperbacks). Or that you cannot price every one of the thousands of books that come into a store individually. Or that no one has a computer model that does so. I wonder why they’re called Half Price Books. That wouldn’t be a convenient formula for pricing the bulk of their ordinary books, would it? It works for other stores I have been in, along with the 70% off model for remainder stores.
You are at best comparing apples to oranges. I said, in a post that you didn’t think responded to you but in fact did, that finding prices is worthwhile for certain books. I also said that bookstore professionals work hard all day long to price books appropriately. But that they also run into time restraints and so must bulk mark much of the product. I wonder if your imaginary economists worked out the pricing for their:
BOOKS BY THE YARD
And I said, and am saying again, that we are not talking about any of those things. That the books most likely to turn up are the books that sell the most, the disposable bestsellers that are churned out in the millions and flung into piles just as quickly, making them essentially worthless in any coherent sense and sold by non-experts with even less time to sort things out.
If you want to get in to the economics of a different class of used books and used bookstores and how the internet has changed the entire business model in the past ten years, start a thread. This thread is about a lower class of books and their sad, sad ends.
Thanks for going back and reading my posts.
I’ll respond to it below. I want to point out that in a post responding to someone else (understandable if you didn’t read that) I have already said you have a good point when you say that many sellers have reasons to sell books for less than they are worth. For example, turnaround may be more important than maximizing profit on each individual book. That was your point and I took it on board. I mention this because below, you reiterate this point in your remarks about bulk pricing, as though I hadn’t already indicated that I had read this from you already and had agreed with you about it. (But again, since that post was in response to someone else, not you, I can understand if you didn’t notice that remark.)
I’m confused by this remark. Isn’t half of the price of an ordinary book a lot more than a dollar, much less a dime?
Let me repeat my argument. The conclusion to the argument is, it’s surprising if used books are really only generally worth a dime or so. The argument for this is: There is a corporation that sells used books, and generally sells them for several dollars. Corporations tend to have done quite a bit of research and know their stuff when it comes to what can be charged.
Certainly there are other venues where books only get sold for a dime to a dollar or so. But such venues (garage sales, “mom and pop” stores, individual sellers online, etc) are likely to know less about what they can charge for books–or (and thanks to Exapno for bringing this more to my attention) have reasons to sell books for less than they are worth.
That sounds like an attempt to explain why people would price the majority of books for less than what they could sell the books for if they put some thought into how much they could sell the books for. That is indeed what I was expressing surprise about in my first post, and now I’m a little less surprised. So thanks. (Though I still think if I were selling a bunch of old books, I’d charge a dollar each, and would probably make more money than I would if I charged a dime each. But I’m not a bookseller, so I don’t have to deal with the issues of turnover and bulk that you brought up.)
Not sure what you’re getting at here. I’m talking about old raggedy used books, with notes scribbled in them and stuff.
My daughter worked at a HFB for a while, both as a clerk and buyer. Most books were indeed priced at half price, but they were regularly examined and the older ones pulled and put on the clearance rack. So, you have a number of used books, most of which will sell at half the original price, and most of the rest of which will sell at $1 or $2. If the books don’t sell on the clearance shelf, then they’re put in the recycling bin. So, not all books will sell for half of the retail price. Some sell for considerably less. HPB is very concerned about rapid turnover.
It depends on the book and its condition. I picked up a few books at the thrift shop for prices varying between a dime and a quarter each. And I don’t think that I paid too little for them. Most of them were books that I had mentally marked as “maybe I’ll read them someday”. They weren’t books that I desperately wanted. I probably would not have paid as much as a dollar each for them, especially since they were in such poor condition (pages falling out, cover was half missing, etc.) that they really only deserved the rating of “reading copy”, which is the lowest rating a used book can have if it’s considered marketable at all. Many sellers won’t carry reading copies, as they’re tough to move. However, I did buy the books, I read them, and then I returned them to the thrift shop. I got my money’s worth out of them, but they weren’t worth keeping. If I liked the book enough to want my own copy to keep and reread, I would have gotten rid of the reading copy and bought another, better copy.
Dublin, yes. Well all the ones I’ve been in of late on the north side of the city have some selection of books. There’s an Enable one in Phibsboro Shopping Centre I’ve picked up a number of books in, the one I was talking about that had 10 books for a € is in Blanchardstown village. Do you live in Dublin? Depending on the type you want I can just give you some if you like.
Hmm, the books at the thrift I go to are in pretty good shape - not any worse than those in the used book stores. But they are very careful to limit the amount of obvious junk on their shelves.
Most of the used bookstores I go to have clear and simple pricing algorithms they use, which sort books into a couple of categories which gets priced accordingly. There are a few exceptions. Specialty SF stores (I’m thinking of you, Change of Hobbit) know what they have and price accordingly - too high for my tastes, though it makes me feel rich to see what they charge for crap like The Avenger pb series.
Some try to be clever. A guy at one bookstore I go to said that he priced the later Doc Savage pbs high because they had smaller print runs and were rarer. I’d guess the demand for them would be way down, since only collectors like me, or a few fanatics, would make it through 90 of these things. I’ve transferred my allegiance to another store which prices all pbs - even ones from the '50s, at one low price, more on cover price than value. They are big and busy.
In the US anyway, you can donate books and take a tax deduction for their value, which you are free to determine by some method you believe would be credible if you were audited. Every time I donate books to my library (for their annual sale, although they will occasionally comment on some newish hardcover in perfect condition that they plan to shelve it) they give me a tax receipt form. It doesn’t have any particular valuation, just acknowledges a donation that day.