To be clear, though, there’s no way for anyone to enforce this idea against you once you’ve purchased the book. The first-sale doctrine applies to you just as much as it does to the shop which has that sign hung up.
As has been said, if they wanted to keep those books in the community for people to read, they should be in a library.
(If you really wanted to use your scanner, stick it in a handbag or shopping bag and never take it out. It would have to work in low-light conditions, though: You’d be arbitraging books as through a scanner, darkly.)
They’re most certainly talking about book resellers. A lot of people (myself included) don’t like them because they’re, to put it kindly, douchenuggets. They may be perfectly nice people in real life, but when they’ve got scanners in their hands they become gigantic assholes.
They clog up aisles not because there are a lot of them, but because as soon as they show up they pull piles of books off the shelves and make little book-forts all over the place so they can sit there and scan them. When they find something they want to keep, or something they might buy if they don’t find anything better, they’ll try to hide it from the other ragpickers by shelving it someplace weird. Given that all the other ones are also doing this, it means whatever organization the books had at the start is gone in minutes.
The worst part is, they don’t buy a lot of books. They only buy what they think will make them a profit, and at something like a library book sale, that’s not very much. So they create this huge mess and inconvenience for the other shoppers and the staff for not very much end benefit to the library that was having the book sale in the first place.
First, shelf space is not unlimited. For every book that’s on a library shelf, that means that other books can’t fit. Second, the book might not be needed in the collection. How many copies of last year’s best seller does a library need? Sometimes one. Sometimes none. Same thing goes for all those cookbooks that various women’s organizations print up, and try to sell for charity. The leftovers get donated to the library.
And, as noted, the resellers are a pain in the ass for both the workers and the regular buyers. They scatter the books all over the place, they don’t buy most of the books they pull off the shelves, and when they DO reshelf, they don’t put the books in the right place! This means that the workers have to re-organize the books, and the regular buyers will probably miss out on books that they would have loved to buy. Who thinks of looking for a mystery in the cookbook section?
Most libraries are chronically short of money, and they want to make the most money from these sales without investing a lot of time or effort. Those resellers screw things up for everyone. If the resellers had an ounce of common courtesy, then the book shop wouldn’t have to resort to such tactics.
That’s what I’m saying. It’s not as if this is some wonderful trove of important books that the resellers are stealing away from the community. If there are notable titles in these stacks that aren’t in the library, that’s the library’s fault, not the fault of people who are picking through the library’s rejects.
Well, yes. Lack of courtesy is the root of a lot of problems.
The thing is, a book (or anything, really) will have different values to different targets. I might be EXTREMELY interested in the first novel of a favorite author…but by subjective criteria, it really isn’t very good, and most people are not going to check it out of the library. So while I might be overjoyed to find the book for sale, it will just take up shelf space that this year’s best seller could use. If only 2 people check out a book in ten years, but 100 people want to check out this year’s best seller this year, the library is going to decide that this year’s best seller deserves to be on its shelves this year, and might even order more than one copy.
I took a couple of courses of library science, and this subject was very important.
I’ve never seen this, but they do sound like assholes. I’d ban them, too. In fact, I’d be tempted to put in fake bar codes so they buy totally unsaleable books.
My main exposure to them has been at the “Friends of the Library” booksales that my wife volunteered for a few years back. Of course, those booksales were always polite but cutthroat even before the introduction of the scanners. The scanners seemed to eliminate the “polite” part.
Reading through the thread linked to by Astro, and following a few other threads in that forum, I’m discovering that there are hierarchies to book resellers (like any human endeavor, I suppose), and most of them also look down at the jerks that show up to library booksales and act like they were raised by particularly poorly behaved wolves. If only there was a way for the people they were buying books from to give the scanner folks ratings on their Amazon or eBay page.
The contents of the library booksale have already been gone through for possible candidates for the library collection. The booksale volunteers sort through the books, price them, and set aside things that look useful to the library. There are plenty of items, though, that the library itself may not need that could still be in demand or even valuable, though valuable things generally get pulled and shown directly to a knowledgeable seller who will give them a good price without any further ado.
People scan old prints from referance books and then make copies for resale. These people tend to damage books by either flattening them out and screwing up the binding or by actually tearing out pages for a good scan. They also tend to disrupt the “normal” ambiance of your typical library; thus bringing down the wrath of your local library police.
the problem with scanners that I can see is that if they allow/encourage scanners, then other shoppers might get the impression that “all the good books are already gone, all that’s left is trash that they’re overcharging for anyway”
if they ban scanners then they might actually sell more of the books that they’re charging what it’s worth
Ah! I saw someone being swept away in ignomy from the (for profit) used book counters at the South Bank recently. I had actually noticed him go ‘title, backpage, phone or something that was similar-sized out,’ repeatedly and wondered what he was doing.
I bet they’re in league with the secondhand furniture dealers who nab all the best stuff off Freecycle.
This is pretty much it. Also, people with scanners spend a lot more time in the store per book they buy than people who are browsing, and anything with a high enough price that it can be resold for profit is very likely to be in demand by other patrons, meaning the people with scanners don’t really add anything to the bottom line. They’re just buying the books that were going to sell for sure anyway.
If the stores actually wanted to beat the scanners, they’d raise their prices to ensure it wasn’t worth the scanners’ time to do what they do. If enough stores do it, no more scanners.
This leads to either an equilibrium (prices are kept just high enough to keep the scanners out; defectors are reliably punished with scanners) or a tiered market: Some stores have low prices and scanners, others have high prices and no scanners. The main thing in the tiered market is to advertise which kind of store you are: Cheap or relaxing, based on the assumption that ‘no scanners’ is equivalent to ‘relaxing’.
