I wouldn’t steal anything. I would buy something without launching an investigation into whether it was stolen. The book with a cover purchased at a book store could be stolen also. I don’t know the law on ownership of property that was stolen, but it would have to be an awfully expensive book before a court would consider the matter.
Owners of legal property cannot leave their goods in public places and expect society and the law to enforce their rights if the goods are used in some manner the owner did not intend.
No it isn’t. In the case being discussed, the only beneficiary is the publisher who pays less to account for unsold books. It doesn’t benefit the author or anyone else.
Publishers could solve this problem by charging for books when they are shipped, or paying for the return of unsold books. Instead, they are shifting the burden of their shoddy practice to others.
Thieves are scum. People who buy something that might have been stolen are not. If you buy a house, a title search is required, for a book, any purchaser can assume the sale is legitimate without evidence to the contrary. Printing a statement in every book about it being potential stolen property is not evidence of theft. It’s evidence of publishers saving money for themselves.
Don’t leave your property on the street and expect me to help you maintain ownership of it.
As a slight aside - I was sitting in Logan airport in Boston several years ago waiting for a flight. Ann Rice the author of vampire novels was sitting a few seats away. A young girl that was a clerk in one of the magazine/book stores rushed up and wanted Ms Rice to autograph a copy of one of her novels - yup you guessed it the cover was torn off.
Ms Rice smiled and very politely autographed it for her.
It is possible that Ann Rice had been broke earlier in her life, and read stripped books herself. At least she knew that this was one autographed copy unlikely to end up being sold.
You read some weird claims about property, but this has to take the cake. It makes no sense whichever way you approach it.
First, stripped books are never in a public place. They are in the backroom of a bookstore. They were stolen either by the bookstore owner or by employees. There is no rational case to be made that this is a public place, nor any possible case to be made that anyone owning or employed by a store can steal goods out of the store and sell them for their own benefit.
Second, what constitutes a public place? Can I take your car if you park it on the street? In fact, all of society is geared around the notion that you cannot take other people’s property even if the owner doesn’t hide it behind a moat and dragons. If you leave your house unlocked, there is no legal or moral exemption for thieves to come in and rob you blind.
As I said earlier, publishers did solve this problem. By prosecution. And with the full approval and cooperation of authors. Hardly any publisher today bothers to put in the notice because it’s simply unnecessary. I haven’t seen stripped books in years, possibly decades.
Theft is theft. It’s one way. You don’t blame the victim. Of anything, anytime, anywhere.
Also, at a few of the places I worked at, after we stripped the cover, we would physically tear the book in half or thirds, depending on the thickness, so even if you went dumpster diving, you would have to sort through many hundreds of book pieces to find a ‘whole’ book.
Right. Someone misinformed me. Although wikipedia says this which sounds like wholesalers are still surveyed:
In 1992, the survey encompassed over 3,000 bookstores as well as “representative wholesalers with more than 28,000 other retail outlets, including variety stores and supermarkets.”
I’m not so sure. For criminal liability to occur in theory, you normally have to know the property is stolen, or at the least you have to have been criminally reckless in ignoring serious evidence that would make a reasonable person believe the property was stolen (willful blindness). In some jurisdictions, there may be laws stating that if you purchase goods that have had the serial number removed, then you are presumed to be aware that they were stolen. These laws wouldn’t be needed if knowledge wasn’t an element of possessing stolen property.
Civilly, one might be required to return unknowningly possessed stolen property via a lawsuit.
40 years ago when I started collecting, I saw these books all the time, though I forget if they were in used bookstores or in the set of books that the library of the hospital my mother worked in sold to support themselves. I haven’t seen them for sale in ages, though, not even in used bookstores.
I worked at a department store one summer in college and they used to put the coverless books in the employee lounge for us to take home. Wasn’t like we were going to sell them, and it was nice of them to let us enjoy the books vs. simply tossing them in the trash.
Which, if you’ve read this thread, you now know was a violation of their contract with the publishers and, arguably, theft. Widely winked at, at least at the time, but so nevertheless.
Another factor is that there are far fewer mass market paperback books published, and trade paperbacks aren’t stripped.
There used to be a bookstore here in Schenectady in the early 70s that sold nothing but stripped books. They closed down very quickly.
The system is a bit foolish (and painful to destroy perfectly good books), but it was necessary. The issue wasn’t bookstores (who return hardback and trade paper books all the time) as much as it was rack jobbers, who sold books in those spinner racks in supermarkets and airports and newstands. They needed the easy way to return the books, and the policy was also applied to bookstores to keep it simple. There are far fewer book racks out there nowadays, and supermarkets sell very few books.
Eh. A quick check of the half dozen mass market paperbacks I’ve most recently purchased reveals that they all have the notice (and “recent” is within the last couple months). I will admit that they are all SF/Fantasy, so maybe non-fiction or mainstream literary books aren’t being published with the notice, but it still seems pervasive in genre fiction.
Just so everyone knows the origin of this practice, it began when the book market was all but destroyed during the Great Depression in the United States. Publishers couldn’t get retailers to take a chance on new titles, so they came up with the idea of giving a smaller discount, but guaranteeing the sale by accepting returns.
Also, there’s a wide perception that this is a completely “free” process for booksellers. Not true. We have to pay the shipping to return the unsold books (It’s only mass-market paperbacks that are “strippable.” With anything else, we return the whole book.) There are also frequently limits on how much you can return, and distributors have a return fee as well (e.g., you buy the book at a 40% discount, but only get a 50% credit if you return it).
Please understand that all bestseller lists are different. NYT, as pointed out upthread, includes some wholesale transactions, and also counts pre-orders, which can allow a book to be a #1 bestseller before it’s even available for sale. The Indie bestseller lists are only sales to consumers by independent booksellers. The Amazon list is only sales through Amazon. There are lots of lists, and they all have different rules.
Huh. I worked at a “news agency” (distributor of mass market books for bookstores in Alaska in the early 90s) and they would let us take up to 10 coverless paperbacks home per week. I think that might have even included comics. I’m not sure I remember the notice about theft the OP copied in any of them though, or at least not in that form. How long has it been in use?
Also, having read recently about the poor sales of hardcover children’s picture books and such, what happens to them? I hate to think they get ripped up.
During college, I worked at a record store which also had a rental video and popular book section. This is how I got a ton of free books and magazines to read. I just waited for our buyer to start tearing off covers and would hand the remaining book out to anyone in the staff who was interested.
The key point is this - the retailer returns the cover for a refund of his purchase of the books/magazines. Part of this refund is the agreement to destroy the rest of the product.
Some retailers are lacksadaisical, or their employees cheat and keep a copy or two for themselves (or they give them out as prizes at the county fair…) Some retailers, no doubt, have full-blown reseller arrangements for the stripped copies. Regardless, it’s fraud on the part of the retailer if he claims a refund and does not uphold his end of the contract. It’s theft if the employee disregards instructions and keeps a copy. If it’s retreived by dumpster-diving, I guess the issues are more grey.
The warning is for innocent 3rd parties. 50 years or more after the practice started, obviously at least one person asks this question because they are not aware of the situation. Knowing that you are facilitating fraud and theft, would you buy a book anyway? Would you still pay almost full price for something the seller got for nothing? They warn you, and what you do after that is your conscience.
Standard retail profit IIRC is 33% to 40% of cover price, so they make more money selling a book at half-off stripped.
Some of the stripped books, especially in regular used book stores, may be the 1 or 2 “borrowed” by employees from the garbage pile and then resold. If the store has shelves of them, someone must have an organized “supply process”. I have been in a large number of used bookstores in Canada, and I don’t recall ever seeing a stripped paperback; not sure if it’s legal reasons or store policy.
At my store, we try to buy carefully so that we don’t have massive numbers of returned books (as I pointed out above, returning is not free). I take all of the mass-market paperbacks with covers stripped to recycling.
Very few bookstores will sell books with stripped covers, because of the potential penalties. All it takes is one person notifying the publisher or distributor and you’re cut off. It’s like selling a book before its release date: they’ll never ship early to you again. Typically, if you see stripped books for sale, it’s going to be a gift shop or drugstore where books are a tiny percentage of their revenue and they may not know any better.
My store sells used books, too, and I won’t accept books with stripped covers for credit. Most people understand when I explain it, but I’ve had a few people get very upset with me and say I’m accusing them of being criminals. I’m not. I’m just saying I won’t pay for that book, even with credits, and I won’t sell it in my store.
Hardcover books and (for the most part) trade paperbacks do not get their covers stripped. Generally speaking, if they are returned, they go back to the publisher and get sold to another retailer. If they languish in the warehouse too long, they get “remaindered.”
Remaindering is the process of selling books to a specialty discount company for a small fraction of their original price. Some publishers will mark them with a dot or line across the top of the pages, or across the barcode. This assures that they can’t be returned. The discount company–a.k.a. “remainder house”–makes them available to booksellers at a deep discount. This is where the books come from that you see on the 60% off or 70% off sale table.
Another source of remainder books is the leftover hardbacks when a book is issued in paperback. It leads to odd situations where a book may be available as a $15 trade paperback, while the hardback edition is discounted from $25 to $10.
I can’t say that I have ever seen a book that has had anything about being sold without a cover printed in it, but I have often seen this (in British books):
Would this be an analogue to the US coverless condition and would it mean (providing that UK laws have any say outside Britain) that I can’t, if I have for some reason rebound my copy of a book, lend it to someone?