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by lucas_membrane
1342 days ago
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> My town library just had its annual book sale which comes from some combination of donations over the course of the year and culling its collection. Depending on the day of the sale it was $10-$20 Yes, library sales are wonderful. Random books at garage sales and library sales are very inexpensive.
My question is, what happens to the books at the library sale that are unsold there? Our information age with everyone wearing and carrying multiple computers is not doing anything to make particular books more affordable to anyone. If you want to buy a particular book, you have a hard time beating the prices that the huge Amazon consortium maintains. The modern technology has taken over and re-shaped the economy to the point where someone who wants to shop from a large selection of books does not even think about trying to walk into a book store, but the efficiencies of Amazon, et al., have not delivered a bounteous improvement in connecting people to stuff over what the mail order operations of Montgomery Ward in the 1890's and Sears in the early 1900's provided. The promised techno-age economy of mass specialization and mass customization is proving elusive. > That's actually a useful market mechanism. There is some question about how one can force fit a competitive market model onto what is going on here. The market in particular titles is so thin that it is hardly a market. I can't sell at any price titles that I can buy on-line at $35 or $50. What makes the odd item worth more? The odd sale at $100 or $150 every few years to the one or few buyers obsessed or wealthy enough to pay that? There may be another possible market equilibrium that our current move-fast-and-break-things system is unable to find, in which twenty times the volume flows at one tenth the price. |
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The same thing that happens to literally tons of other paper with ink/toner on it. It gets pulped or whatever. I'm not sure how books could have a particular conduit from random item that someone really would prize to that person.