A customer walked up to me with a book today asking what this symbol meant. To the right of the EAN barcode is a small equilateral triangle with the capital letter S in the center.
What does this mean??
From this page:
I presume that means something to a bookstore, but I don’t personally know what strippable means.
I believe it means that they can remove the cover and send it back as proof it hadn’t been sold. They don’t bother sending the whole book back, and the stripped book is destroyed.
Could refer to stripping the cover and returning it to the publisher for partial refund on unsold books (to save shipping costs vs. returning the whole book). The stripped book is supposed to be destroyed, which is why you’ll sometimes see that warning about buying books with stripped covers – it’s a legal no-no to sell them.
Strangely enough, I have three different paperbacks here from three different publishers, and none of them have this symbol. Why not? Is it a UK thing, or is it rare anyway?
(Accordian Crimes, Armageddon the Musical, and The Flying Sorcerers, if you must know…
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It’s not rare at all, if you buy sort of low-end paperbacks, like series romance novels or cheesy SF printed on that cheap newsprint. Your “better” paperbacks aren’t usually strippable.
But it is definitely NOT a UK phenomenon exclusively.
And all these years I thought the little triangle with a letter in it meant that it had been printed on a kosher press.
Actually, it has nothing to do with the literary quality of the book. Lots of excellent fiction, history, and reference works are printed as strippable. The naming distinction (at least in the U.S.) is that strippables are called “mass market paperbacks” and the others are called “trade paperbacks.” “Trades” tend to be different sizes and “mass markets” tend to be the standard size that fits in a drug store display rack (6 7/8" x 4 1/8" ?), but most of the Penguin Classics are sold as “trades” even though they are the same size as a “mass market” and there have been very large format paperbacks (and one hardcover that I saw) that were labeled “mass market.” (Signet and New American Library published just as many “classics” of literature as Penguin, but their books were always “mass markets” and strippable.)
The choice of “mass market” or “trade” is simply one made by the publisher regarding what they will accept as returns in the pseudo-consignment method of stocking that is used by the publishing industry.
Is the S-in-triangle a U.K. phenomenon? I don’t recall seeing it in the States. (Of course, I haven’t *looked]/i] for it, yet.)
All my U.S. editions of Terry Pratchett paperbacks have the triangle S. I’ve also got several other trade paperbacks that have an empty triangle instead.
Back when I used to work for a bookstore, I saw these all the time - both the triangle-S and the empty triangle. In my experience, it’s used mostly by imprints where there might be some question about things being strippable, rather than by, say, Harlequin. Of course, we also had a big shiny computer inventory program that we were supposed to go by No Matter What, which told us what terms the book had been bought under - provided that the corporate data-entry temps could read invoices.
(Question: How much money does a national chain lose by telling all its stores to strip return a bestseller that isn’t actually strippable? Answer: $Plenty 
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