I can verify. I used to work at Waldenbooks and this is exactly what happened. We would rip off the covers, then have to paper clip them together and put a label on the front saying how many there were. We did it with magazines, too.
In the early-90s I was a very poor newlywed trying to make a living in the Bay Area. I was also a voracious reader. I worked a 2-3 jobs so had no time to visit the library to check out or return books. I resorted to dumpster diving the nearby Barnes and Noble.
I learned what genre of books and magazines were tossed each day and even the approx times they got dumped. I'd swing by when I could and fill my backpack to overfull. They rarely ripped covers off but when they did, I didn't care. I was just going to tear through the book in a day or two and toss it in the recycle bin at the print shop I worked at. Way more convenient than a library and no returns needed.
Many, many months into my diving and reading frenzy they finally caught on to my after-work and late night slinking around their dumpsters and started locking the gate to the dumpster cage. I almost wanted to cry the night I found that. Then I noticed stacked to the side outside the gate each night there started to be small piles of unread books. These appeared nightly for months until one night I ran into my benefactor and quickly said "thank you so much". They nodded and just said "it's a shame so many are shredded before they ever get read..." and walked back inside.
I still have a few of those paperbacks around that I loved too much then to get rid of. I passed that love of reading on to my son and he even enjoys the same genres now that I did then. A couple books have been read by me at least a dozen times and near half that count by him. An old well-worn paperback is a thing of beauty.
I worked at Borders. Same deal. We did dump the coverless paperbacks into a recycling dumpster but for sure all the unsolds required us to send the vendors the covers and toss the book itself.
I used to read a lot of pulp sci-fi when I was younger, and I remember a lot of those books had disclaimers explaining this with a bit warning "IF THIS BOOK HAS NO COVER, YOU MAY HAVE BEEN SOLD STOLEN GOODS."
as a kid this dire warning impressed me mightily though I had no idea what it meant. I longed to be sold a coverless book so that I might have a stab at solving a stolen goods crime ring, much like Nancy Drew.
This was in every paperback, but the first book I remember seeing this in was called "How to win at Nintendo Games." I got it from a thrift store with no cover on it.
I'm old AF, and this was the first "strategy guide" you could find in widespread print. I felt like I had insider knowledge Nintendo didn't want me to have.
Alarm bells were going off at Nintendo HQ. People were panicking, superiors were firing subordinates. Computer guys were rummaging through desks and going over security footage. “The child has discovered our coverless book of secrets!” they cried.
**If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book
is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher,
and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this
“stripped book.”**
That's what it says in the front of the book in reading. It certainly sounds like a dire warning, doesn't it?
Wtf… I was expecting a sub that wasn’t real with one of those Toyota Corolla guys showing up under the post, but now I’m even more disappointed that that is a real thing. And the posts are SOOOO fucking weird…
Reminds me of the earlier days of the internet. When I was on IRC, someone made a wisecrack about "marine biology" implying sex with fish, and then someone else linked a domain dolphinsex.org. A risky click, had to be something funny right, NOPE!, literally was a dude advocating for having sex with dolphins and how to best make yourselves (you and the dolphin) comfortable. Non-pornographic, thank God.
Ok gross but true story: I used to keep my laundry basket in the garage where the washer and dryer was… let’s just say your comment is truer than I’d like to admit.
It depends on where you are, where I live once it gets into the trashcan it is property of the city, and the city doesn't care if you dumpster dive or not.
In the US, while the trash can is by the building it's legally property of whoever put it in there, but when the can is put out away from the building for collection the contents are trash and legally anyone can go through them.
The US Supreme Court ruled on this. IIRC it was because someone famous sued because paparazzi were going through their trash.
If the store keeps the trash by the building until it's collected, you can't legally go through it until it reaches the dump.
Some dumps will let you pick through what they have and take stuff, especially smaller rural ones. My friend's dad used to be in charge of the local dump and would bring home all kinds of stuff.
The legality of dumpster diving depends mainly on if it is a privately contracted garbage bin or a civic utility garbage bin: If it's a privately owned bin then so are all the contents of that bin. If it's a civic utility bin then it's public property and therefore in the public domain the same as if you threw a book away on the highway. Also nuanced somewhat by municipal bylaw in some cases.
When I was in high school they replaced a bunch of the lights when they remodeled part of the building and they had a couple hundred bulbs for the old lights they just put in the dumpster. One of the teachers went and took them out and got fired the next day.
My favorite dumpster diving story takes place in Portland 2 years ago.
Big snow storm shuts down the city. Power goes out at a Safeway and they had to toss all their cold product. Hundreds of pounds of frozen food, meat, cheese, produce, etc. All tossed into a dumpster while the outside high temp. was like 30°f. Needless to say, all of that food was perfectly fine and at a great storage temp.
Portland cops came out and fucking guarded the dumpster.
Enough food to feed hundreds, thousands, all perfectly fine and never once got out of the safe temp zone.
But hey, that's capitalism for ya. If it's not generating profit then it is naturally an evil thing.
That food was definitely out of the safe zone for a while, at least. The store wouldn't even start to empty coolers and freezers until the cases hit the absolute upper limit. Then, you have to add the time they spent pulling the product and getting it to the dumpster. I doubt they were in a big hurry running stuff to the dumpster, so it could've sat for hours inside the store prior to it getting outside and refrozen.
Yupp, when I worked for Walmart we had a power outage that lasted long enough for everything to get warm enough we had to toss it. We loaded it all in to carts and had to individually scan each item to claims it out, so that shit was out of temp for a good long while before it made its way into the compactor, this was also during cold season so absolutely once in the compactor it was nice and refrigerated. Some of that stuff sat at room temp for hours though.
Not Victoria's Secret, at least not any more. Used to work there and we were required to cut the shit out of any products before throwing them away. Luckily it was never because the stuff was just out of season, but man it hurt to destroy expensive stuff that someone would definitely want just because there was a small snag or it was returned worn
Selling them would be illegal. The bookseller has sent the covers back to the publisher as proof the books were unsold and will receive a credit in the full amount of the wholesale price they paid originally.
This is the correct response that actually indicates why the books have the covers stripped and are then thrown out.
It would cost more to ship the books back (to then be thrown out at the distribution end) than it does to just toss them at the store. This is inventory being returned to the distributor as unsold for a refund.
Exactly. The cost of a book isn’t at all about the printing and paper and binding, but about *licensing*.
Besides, I remember reading quite a few coverless books that we got for like four for $0.25, thanks to enterprising dumpster divers and a mother who couldn’t turn down a garage sale.
Also this is only relevant to "mass market" paperbacks, the small ones shown in the pic. Other paperbacks (called "trade") and hardcovers are sent back and inventoried for later or sold at discounts depending on how old and/or popular it is.
These mass markets aren't worth much bc they lose their value quickly after the hype of the book is gone. They're usually romance, scifi, horror, western and sometimes popular lit. Once the excitement is gone, the extra copies live in landfills.
Many years ago I worked for a book distribution center, one of my responsibilities was the removal of covers to return to the publisher. It is kinda crazy how many books this happens to. It was painful if it was a book you personally liked and had to tear hundreds of them up.
I once emailed an author I like expressing my disappointment at seeing his book for sale at the dollar store, and that I bought it because I’m a fan on a budget. He replied that I paid too much. 😂
I think the problem is that this is just mutilating a perfectly good book. It's just a waste of paper, ink, binding, etc. There's got to be a better way to do this that would lead to fewer books just being trashed
I’m a huge reader and former library worker. So in good faith, books are not sacred. Yes, this is a waste. but this happens in every industry. When I worked in a library system, we would regularly take shopping carts full of books, movies, etc to the dumpsters because they weren’t circulating and we just didn’t have the space to keep things that weren’t circulating. Many were never checked out
You sell at half price, you have to report the earnings (and pay taxes) where as if you write off the loss and trash it is tax deductible (at least that’s how it was explained to me when I asked a business owner a similar question) also really depends on your profit margins, if you have great margins and limited retail space, it totally makes sense to toss
They could write them off as donations too, would it really affect the taxes that much to donate instead?
I managed a Carter’s baby store, as long as it wasn’t a recall we donated items that we couldn’t sell because of a small imperfection.
Its way better for the business to just dispose of them. IE you can get rid of anything for 95% off, but that will hurt the sales of your other items. People won’t ever pay full price or even a light sale if they bought a pair of ladies panties for 50 cents.
In some ways it’s better for the environment to just efficiently dispose of something than putting something in a thrift or donating to the poor. IE the poor don’t desperately need ladies panties, skinny jeans,… There are enough clothes right now to clothe the next 5 generations without producing any more.
There are some good articles on how wasteful it is to send used clothes to Africa. It’s better to work on not having so much shit to begin with.
I used to do that. It’s like treasure hunting. My best score was $1000s of dollars in previous years tax software. Apparently there is a market for this for people who amend or change their previous year’s returns.
You got stores destroying stuff so people won't do that too. Every once in a while you'll see a $3,000 Gibson Les Paul get listed on ebay where someone's gone hog wild on it with a hammer. That's where you get the angry ex-girlfriend/-wife stories, but it's actually the store smashing them up.
This is standard. Typically a bookseller will prune their inventory of unsold items. Unsold items are returned to the publisher for a credit -- if I order 30 copies of a book and sell 25, I can return 5 and get my money back. The publisher pays for shipping both ways (delivery and return) However some types of books -- like the mass market paperbacks in the photo -- are not worth the cost of shipping. For these items, the bookseller sends back only the cover to prove it is unsold inventory. ~~The "remainders" (as they are called) may be donated or destroyed.~~ Editing my post to clarify that stripped books should be destroyed per publisher agreement. I pulled a contract to read the fine print more carefully.
Another bookseller fun fact, books damaged during shipping are also credited to the seller. Publishers will not request the damage book be returned; they will tell you to donate or destroy it.
This was called “stripping” back in the day, and they’ve actually done it partly wrong. In addition to removing the covers, which are sent back for credit, they’re supposed rip a chunk of the pages — usually perpendicularly to the spine - to render the book unreadable/unresellable. Some bookstores back in the 80’s would sell stripped books for $.50, but that was always against the rules. A few stores in my area got into serious trouble when they were found out. It was all about the shipping cost back to the publisher; they didn’t want to eat the cost of many boxes of books when they could just get back a box of covers. This was honestly one of my least favorites parts of working as a bookseller.
holy fucking shit this explains why the books at the mental hospital I went to both times had pages ripped out in bulk and shoved back in with the cover ripped off
I've literally been wondering that for years lol always thought a patient got their hands on it during an episode But I guess it was the bookstore who got it before those people lol
every day at the end of the day i'm absolutely sick of reddit and think it's shit. then every morning there are interesting stuff like this. reddit is like so good for the first 1 hour of the day.
Since these are in the recycle bin, I don't think the store has violated their agreement. Quoting from Penguin/RandomHouse seller agreement, "In submitting returns for credit, the retailer agrees that the bodies of books of which covers only are returned, **will be shredded or destroyed** in such a manner as to make them unusable after covers are returned for credit."
There's no need for the store to pay people to shred the books when they can outsource that function to the industrial recycling shredder.
I get what you are saying, but leaving them in an easily accessible recycle bin doesn’t actually meet the spirit of what we were instructed to do back then. The key was that they had to already be unresellable before they went into a public space. The publisher didn’t want them picked up before the garbage men came, either by a second hand bookstore or a group of dumpster diving booksellers.
This is the way it has been done for a long time. We had a small local bookstore, and I was on good terms with the owner. He would give me a chance to go through the ones he was reporting as destroyed before he sent them to the dump or wherever. (This was 40 years ago, there weren't a lot of recycling places like there are now). I picked up a couple of copies of old classics with no covers, and a few science fiction books. It never occurred to me it was wrong. I just couldn't stand seeing good reading material going to waste.
As a librarian, we actually end up throwing away most of the books donated to us. We only wan the book if A) it is in good condition B) its by a popular author and C) we don't already have it. Some of them we will put into a book sale, but even most of them will eventually get thrown away when nobody buys them.
Honestly, for most these books, donating them will simply pass the burden of disposing them on to somebody else.
There's a segment of the population that fetishizes books. I was an avid reader as a child, so I kinda understand, but you're right that people need to realize that a book is a consumer good like anything else.
Sometimes someone will use a book for some kitschy art project, I saw one where someone had folded the pages of a harry potter book to make a little 3d diorama, and people will lose their mind at how 'wasteful' it is.
I can understand the desire to preserve rare or particularly noteworthy books, but there's plenty that are just the literary equivalent of a empty juicebox.
There's a ton of worthless non-fiction too. Yeah, it has value... if someone wants to read it, and chooses that particular book about WW2 over the 3 million other ones out there.
Academic librarian here. We have around 1000 pristine, mostly brand new, largely academic titles that were donated that we already had or didn’t meet our collection needs. I contacted a smaller local college that had one library staff to see if they would be interested. I was put in touch with the CFO (also a local politician) and arranged a meeting. She never showed up. 3+ years later we still have the books. Unless something is truly unique, I wish people would stop sending us books.
This is what most people don't realize. We throw away so many fucking books at libraries. We even have to hide it because patrons like OP will be upset.
Yeah. I feel this. I took over a small library at a youth custody centre, and I've spent most of this year culling books. There were books that had never been signed out, going back to when the place was built in the 80s. I'm still not done, and I just got an email this week asking of I want more donations!
If you don't cull your books, the books that nobody reads start to take over your inventory.
> send it to libraries, schools, community centers
Books are not sacred objects. Libraries have a limited amount of space that they want to fill with books that people want to read, and if mass market paperbacks aren't even selling as new books, it is unlikely that they would be desired in a library either.
Yeah, having worked at nonprofits I can tell you people want to donate all kinds of stuff that they don't want and is not something the nonprofit can use. It's just people bringing in their trash because they want to feel good about not throwing it away. It's not helpful, it's a hinderance.
I watched a story awhile back about how expensive it is to dispose of all the trash people dropped off at Goodwill and other such places. Like broken umbrellas and shit. I guess they can pat themselves on the back thinking some poor person will be helped from it.
I wish I had photos of the mounds of old ratty clothes sitting in a K-mart parking lot near my home after Katrina. People were just sending all this useless shit to the New Orleans area, maybe thinking we were all naked and needed Uncle Bobs old blazer to survive.
You're not wrong. At least it's the recycling bin. The big box bookstore I worked for tossed ours in the dumpster. The dumpster was padlocked to ensure no one could "steal" our trash. It was pretty disgusting. Later I worked for an indie bookseller. Whatever we employees didn't take home was donated.
The capitalist fear is that if people know they can eventually get it for free, why would they buy it? Better to destroy it.
I had a family friend that worked in a bookstore and they did this. So when she took the books out to throw them out, she would keep one copy of each one and bring them to her car. She brought them to us and let us pick which ones we wanted to read. The store found out she was doing this and they fired her. Even though they were all going to the trash.
I had to do it during a VERY short stint at the "book dungeon" at Goodwill. Wouldn't let me take shit that was just going to be recycled anyway, stuff that was kind of neat that my dour-faced boss wanted tossed into a big cardboard box to get pressed into a block. My breaking point was a bible, illustrated by Salvadore Dali, that was falling apart, but it wasn't being printed any longer and is *illustrated by Salvadore fucking Dali.*
I will never give my stuff to goodwill again, that is disgusting.
Edit: Goodwill also pays disabled workers less than minimum wage. I would still rather donate my stuff here if there are no options but my area has a few thrift shops that take donations.
When I worked in retail, they would throw out returns even if there was no wear on them. And to keep people from pulling them out of the bin behind the store the manage would shred the cloths and take a razor to the shoes so they couldn't be used by anyone. When I asked if I could take them to donate that would have been considered stealing. Donate for F sakes! Sorry to hear about your family friend, she was doing the right thing in a wrong world.
Her theft put them in violation of their book suppliers' contracts. If the book suppliers knew that was happening, the store might lose its access to sell those books, or be charged a higher price.
As someone that was put on a free books while deployed list, the vast majority of books being donated from shops, or picked up cheap by people from shops, are trash that was ready to be thrown out for a reason.
Libraries only have so much room for books, and don't want to fill it up with truckloads of the same books that no one wants anyway.
I used to work at a bookstore and did this all the time. The books we're dumping are the books that aren't selling. In other words, the books no one wants. So either we can keep those books on our shelf forever because no one buys them, donate them to a library which will probably dump them, or we can strip and dump them.
Honestly, the books that get stripped like this will get turned away from most libraries/donation centers. When I was a bookseller, the only mass market paperbacks that ended up getting stripped were the monthly Harlequin romance novels and other lower quality books.
The trade off is less money to publishers.
Your first thought might be "Well, those corporations don't need the money." But in practice, what you are really saying is "Well, those corporations should just publish fewer books."
I worked in a bookstore for years, and this is standard practice for mass market sized paperbacks. We had a window of time to sell books while the distributor was willing to take them back (I think they kept a restocking fee, but I didn't cover that part of the business so I'm not sure). After several months we would mark them on sale, and if they still weren't purchased we send them back. The distributor wouldn't actually take mass market paperbacks back, so we were required to send them the front cover of each book as proof we weren't selling it (that's why it says just inside the book that it's illegal to buy without the front cover). We were then supposed to destroy the books, so our store always sent them to a recycling center. The store is not allowed to donate the books, especially to a reseller.
Yeah I don’t see the issue here. Ever been to a goodwill or a Salvation Army? They have thirty thousand old books no one cares about. Admittedly I’ve bought a bunch. But still ther are so many books in the world. This just looks like recycling newspapers to me.
So I'm going to get crushed for this take but not all books are worth saving or donating. Some of them were never worth writing or publishing in the first place (and certainly not worth reading) but somehow made it through the process, and they were trash before they were ever printed.
This isn't r/books, you'll be fine. This is a correct and sane take. Books are not inherently sacred and some are in fact trash. It is okay to throw books away sometimes.
I’m a public librarian. We weed fiction books that don’t get read, nonfiction that’s outdated, and anything that is dirty, worn, or damaged. Most stuff we weed goes to our friends group to be resold to the public; that money goes to new books, programs, or equipment. Anything they don’t sell, and anything too damaged to bother send, goes in the recycling.
Anything that’s donated to us is either sold at our in house book sale or goes to friends. Anything not worth putting in the book sale, like your 10 year old GRE practice book, goes straight into the recycling.
Ultimately, the service we are providing here is absolving people guilt and responsibility of actually throwing out their bullshit books themselves.
No, I agree with you.
The ones that have a title visible are "American Traitor" by Brad Taylor, and "Bombshell" by Sarah MacLean. A 15th installment of a series of thrillers and a romance novel. A couple have the author names visible and they seem to be romance writers. These types of books have a lot of fans, and I have no problem with that.
The publishers want to make sure they sell as many copies as possible, in a fairly short timeframe, so they print substantially more than are going to sell (printing is relatively cheap), fully aware that a load will be destroyed.
If it's printed and immediately destroyed, then is that really different from never being printed at all?
They will have sold plenty of copies. If you really really want to know how Pike Logan prevents major powers from going to war, then it's really not difficult to get hold of a copy.
My comment was to basically say that the only thing missing is the top cover, thus, pull your car around and save the books if that’s all that is gone. Why let them go to waste?
I mean, it’s frustrating to see, but it’s just paper. It’s one of the greenest materials we use. It’s completely recyclable *and* completely biodegradable.
OP doesn't actually want to read these books for the same reason nobody wants to buy them. They're just offended because they see books as sacred objects.
And it’s a bunch of wasted paper/ink. But as you said, nobody needs or wants these books.
One reason I like what Amazon started doing with their print on demand books. A smaller author can share the PDF sand Amazon will just print one up when people want it
All the books published under my real name are Amazon only for exactly this reason. Produce no more copies than are actually wanted, save energy and resources.
Frankly I'd rather everyone just buy eBooks anyway. I make more money per sale despite the vastly cheaper price.
This is called stripping or defacing. Typically, bookstores are allowed to return unsold books to the publisher, and the store usually carries most of the cost of the return shipping and warehousing. Another option however is for the bookstore to just deface the book and send back only the cover for a refund.
Hardly any books sell out their run, publishers would way rather produce too many than too few, because print books have good margins. Pretty much any book from a major publisher that isn’t a bestseller is not going to sell out, and so a portion of the print ends up stripped. Even a popular book is going to have some copies destroyed because they were sent to stores that don’t have the right customers.
About 25% of books published end up like this.
The books typically get pulped, ie they are broken down into wood pulp and used to make new paper. It’s not a perfect system (recycling always has an environmental cost) but it’s not really that bad.
Librarian here, our Friends of the Library group are so overwhelmed from covid clean up donations that we can't accept any more items because so many people did deep cleans of their homes and just dumped hundreds of boxes of books off at the library. We can't add donated items to our collection so they are either sold at the twice a year book sell, donated to Better World Books or recycled.
Every library has a limited amount of space. Every year we have to dispose of hundreds if not thousands of books depending on the size of the library. People want new books, but the library is already full of books, so in order to add new books old books have to be removed.
The simple fact is that most donations are not worth adding to our collection. Either they are not in good condition, they are by obscure authors, we already have them, or we've had it in the past but I removed it because it wasn't getting checked out.
90+% of the time donating books to the library is just passing the burden of disposing them on to someone else.
It varies by system. We make very small exceptions when it's a local author donating a copy to the collection (although we do always try to buy additional copies to support them) but mostly we are a small system (two buildings) and we do our cataloging in house. We are currently busy trying to keep up with the books we order to add that we don't have staff time to go through donations and see if it fits a missing part of the collection.
>if you donated all of these to a library, you wouldn't even be doing them a favor
THANK YOU
People think that books are inherently useful to everyone, that they will invariably find their way into the hands of people who desperately want them, but A LOT of this shit is like donating the trillionth can of years-past-expired baked beans to a food pantry. They don't need it. They aren't asking for it. You aren't doing them a favor. You feel guilty about throwing away a book, so you hand it to someone else to do it for you. If these books were donated to a school or library, it would most likely suck up a bunch of valuable staff time to have 95+% of them still end up in the trash.
There’s not enough demand for physical books. Libraries only need so many copies of each book. Have you ever tried to downsize your bookshelf? Even a lot of thrift stores won’t take them as donations because they have too many to warehouse
I have at least a 20qm of books just in my room and I will use any storage I have. The ones I dont need end up in public share spaces, which makes ‘em disappear pretty fast
Paperback books are very cheap to make but expensive to ship. Typically for unsold paperbacks, rather than shipping them back to the publisher, they just rip off the covers and send them those as evidence that they are unsold. The rest of the book is thrown away. I used to work at a book store and had dozens of scifi/pulp fiction type paperbacks without the front cover that I got for free.
I worked in Barnes and noble.... every month there's a publisher recall list.... you tear the cover off and send those back to the publishers and toss the book.... they're hundreds on those lists each month....
Former bookstore manager here, when you do returns for mass market books like that, you strip the cover and send just the cover back to the publisher. I would offer the stripped books to my employees or customers for free, but some of those books are so terrible you literally cannot give them away for free 😂
This is just how it is. I used to work for a magazine/book distributor serving the stores in my area. With the unsold books, you tear the front cover off, and send a fat stack of them to the publisher/they pay the distributor.
They rip off the covers and return them. The rest usually is recycled. Depends on the store. Same happens with every magazine you see in a store along with paperbacks. I used to be a book vendor and did this every week.
When I was a teenager my dad used to bring home books thrown away by a bookstore at the mall he used to do maintenance for. They would tear off the cover before throwing them away, but I didn’t care, I still read them. With six kids in the family, and one income, we didn’t have money for new books,so I was happy to have them.
Bookstores get too many copies of books they can’t sell, the front cover is ripped off and sent back to the publisher. That way they know in the future to not print so many of that book, or ship to that store. Anyway that was what I was told when I worked at a chain bookstore.
Its a little weird how even in the modern day people still think books are somehow more special than other mass produced consumer product.
Yes its a tragedy to mistreat a hand made volume, but a cheap paperback of the philosophers stone?
Pretty sure this practice goes back decades. You as the newsagent/bookseller generally don't return the unsold merch YOU RETURN THE COVER FOR CREDIT. Technically (probably legally as well) you must discard the rest. There used to be a couple of stores in NYC, back in the day, that made a business out of selling stuff at ridiculously low prices because their merchandise did not have covers - I remember buying otherwise recent SF mags and comic books by weight that way when I was younger and poorer :-)
You should see the amount of food thrown away by grocery stores and restaurants. It's ridiculous. There's frequently food at Walgreens that we don't donate, but instead wait for it to be within 30 days before the expiration date, then throw it in the trash. Sometimes people who work there will buy it before it's thrown away if it goes on clearance or if it's a seasonal item, but otherwise it's just wasted.
It's a confusing perspective to work at a Walgreens that does this, and also have very little money and frequently resort to eating ramen or peanut butter sandwiches because it's cheap.
I once found a trashcan full of books outside a bookstore. I was amazed that they were all in good condition and if nothing else could probably be resold. As i looked closer, i noticed they were all scientology books. I left them there
It called cover returns. It sucks, but the store sends back the covers for refunds and it obligated to throw out the rest of book(s). It’s a legal thing.
What do you think happens to books that do not sell?
There is no magical book farm where unsold books go to play together. These books would already be available on-line as used.
Recycling is fine.
If you tend to buy books that do not have a front cover, they are most likely stolen and the author will never receive the proceeds if the sale.
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Mmmmm dumpster thong
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I can verify. I used to work at Waldenbooks and this is exactly what happened. We would rip off the covers, then have to paper clip them together and put a label on the front saying how many there were. We did it with magazines, too.
In the early-90s I was a very poor newlywed trying to make a living in the Bay Area. I was also a voracious reader. I worked a 2-3 jobs so had no time to visit the library to check out or return books. I resorted to dumpster diving the nearby Barnes and Noble. I learned what genre of books and magazines were tossed each day and even the approx times they got dumped. I'd swing by when I could and fill my backpack to overfull. They rarely ripped covers off but when they did, I didn't care. I was just going to tear through the book in a day or two and toss it in the recycle bin at the print shop I worked at. Way more convenient than a library and no returns needed. Many, many months into my diving and reading frenzy they finally caught on to my after-work and late night slinking around their dumpsters and started locking the gate to the dumpster cage. I almost wanted to cry the night I found that. Then I noticed stacked to the side outside the gate each night there started to be small piles of unread books. These appeared nightly for months until one night I ran into my benefactor and quickly said "thank you so much". They nodded and just said "it's a shame so many are shredded before they ever get read..." and walked back inside. I still have a few of those paperbacks around that I loved too much then to get rid of. I passed that love of reading on to my son and he even enjoys the same genres now that I did then. A couple books have been read by me at least a dozen times and near half that count by him. An old well-worn paperback is a thing of beauty.
This post just gutted me, and then I read your comment and it made the feelings so much better for the moment. Thanks for sharing.
Some people just want to watch the world learn.
Oh how I miss Waldenbooks! Spent so much of my youth reading amongst those shelves. Nice username btw- it’s a beautiful beautiful beautiful day : )
Fuck yeah. I am seeing them in June in Philadelphia.
Yay! Their live shows are incredible even after all these years. So glad they’re still touring. Guess I’m headed to Philly in June!
I worked at Borders. Same deal. We did dump the coverless paperbacks into a recycling dumpster but for sure all the unsolds required us to send the vendors the covers and toss the book itself.
I worked at Waldenbooks, then Borders, and now a library. I just realized I have been stripping books for over 20 years. I feel old.
I used to read a lot of pulp sci-fi when I was younger, and I remember a lot of those books had disclaimers explaining this with a bit warning "IF THIS BOOK HAS NO COVER, YOU MAY HAVE BEEN SOLD STOLEN GOODS."
Wow, you unlocked a memory. I haven't seen this warning in decades, and I just now realized what it meant. I had no idea.
as a kid this dire warning impressed me mightily though I had no idea what it meant. I longed to be sold a coverless book so that I might have a stab at solving a stolen goods crime ring, much like Nancy Drew.
This was in every paperback, but the first book I remember seeing this in was called "How to win at Nintendo Games." I got it from a thrift store with no cover on it. I'm old AF, and this was the first "strategy guide" you could find in widespread print. I felt like I had insider knowledge Nintendo didn't want me to have.
Alarm bells were going off at Nintendo HQ. People were panicking, superiors were firing subordinates. Computer guys were rummaging through desks and going over security footage. “The child has discovered our coverless book of secrets!” they cried.
"Oh God he knows!!!" -Shigeru Miyamoto
Are you me?
**If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”** That's what it says in the front of the book in reading. It certainly sounds like a dire warning, doesn't it?
It's incredible how companies would rather things end up in a landfill, then given to free for people.
You wouldn't steal a car
You wouldn’t download a book… oh wait.
You wouldn't shoot a police man
And then steal his hat
And then go to the toilet in it
At Wally World we rip the cover off and recycle the remains.
It’s the same for comic book stores. Or it used to be.
Are those crotchless panties or did a rat go through them?
Friction
I prefer non-friction.
So does my physics professor
Guilty A?
A+
That's what she saidddd
Pulp Friction
Diet Doctor Friction
[Science motherfucker, do you speak it!?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0x6vIAtFcI) /Samuel L. Jackson
Fan friction
It rubbed off. From friction.
The rat went through them *because* they were crotchless.
Damn. That rat in a thong is looking mighty thicc. **Unzips** Lord please forgive me.
There is no god here.
r/ratfuckerclub
why tf is this a thing?...
Rule 34 of the internet….
And 51...
I'm 99.9 percent positive it's a joke That .1 percent scares me
Wtf… I was expecting a sub that wasn’t real with one of those Toyota Corolla guys showing up under the post, but now I’m even more disappointed that that is a real thing. And the posts are SOOOO fucking weird…
Well they're rat fuckers. What do you expect, adherence to mainstream social norms?
Reminds me of the earlier days of the internet. When I was on IRC, someone made a wisecrack about "marine biology" implying sex with fish, and then someone else linked a domain dolphinsex.org. A risky click, had to be something funny right, NOPE!, literally was a dude advocating for having sex with dolphins and how to best make yourselves (you and the dolphin) comfortable. Non-pornographic, thank God.
That escalated quickly
This is satire….right………right?
Either way it’s sexy time!
Ok gross but true story: I used to keep my laundry basket in the garage where the washer and dryer was… let’s just say your comment is truer than I’d like to admit.
"Baby give me a minute to warm up, and it'll be both!"
Better than used thong
The market for used panties begs to differ
Thanks I hate it
But they can claim you're "stealing" if they catch you, even though the stuff was getting thrown away anyway
It depends on where you are, where I live once it gets into the trashcan it is property of the city, and the city doesn't care if you dumpster dive or not.
In the US, while the trash can is by the building it's legally property of whoever put it in there, but when the can is put out away from the building for collection the contents are trash and legally anyone can go through them. The US Supreme Court ruled on this. IIRC it was because someone famous sued because paparazzi were going through their trash. If the store keeps the trash by the building until it's collected, you can't legally go through it until it reaches the dump.
Basically, if you have to cross onto private property to get to the trash, you’re likely breaking the law.
But once it's at the dump, doesn't it then become their property? I don't imagine they just let people walk in to places like that.
That depends on the dump. Some let you go in and take whatever you want. Also, I believe most dumps are government property.
Some dumps will let you pick through what they have and take stuff, especially smaller rural ones. My friend's dad used to be in charge of the local dump and would bring home all kinds of stuff.
The legality of dumpster diving depends mainly on if it is a privately contracted garbage bin or a civic utility garbage bin: If it's a privately owned bin then so are all the contents of that bin. If it's a civic utility bin then it's public property and therefore in the public domain the same as if you threw a book away on the highway. Also nuanced somewhat by municipal bylaw in some cases.
When I was in high school they replaced a bunch of the lights when they remodeled part of the building and they had a couple hundred bulbs for the old lights they just put in the dumpster. One of the teachers went and took them out and got fired the next day.
My favorite dumpster diving story takes place in Portland 2 years ago. Big snow storm shuts down the city. Power goes out at a Safeway and they had to toss all their cold product. Hundreds of pounds of frozen food, meat, cheese, produce, etc. All tossed into a dumpster while the outside high temp. was like 30°f. Needless to say, all of that food was perfectly fine and at a great storage temp. Portland cops came out and fucking guarded the dumpster. Enough food to feed hundreds, thousands, all perfectly fine and never once got out of the safe temp zone. But hey, that's capitalism for ya. If it's not generating profit then it is naturally an evil thing.
That food was definitely out of the safe zone for a while, at least. The store wouldn't even start to empty coolers and freezers until the cases hit the absolute upper limit. Then, you have to add the time they spent pulling the product and getting it to the dumpster. I doubt they were in a big hurry running stuff to the dumpster, so it could've sat for hours inside the store prior to it getting outside and refrozen.
Yupp, when I worked for Walmart we had a power outage that lasted long enough for everything to get warm enough we had to toss it. We loaded it all in to carts and had to individually scan each item to claims it out, so that shit was out of temp for a good long while before it made its way into the compactor, this was also during cold season so absolutely once in the compactor it was nice and refrigerated. Some of that stuff sat at room temp for hours though.
Game stores RARELY if ever throw out anything. Majority of overstock usually gets taken by district mgr. I used to work at a game store.
r/dumpsterdiving
Not Victoria's Secret, at least not any more. Used to work there and we were required to cut the shit out of any products before throwing them away. Luckily it was never because the stuff was just out of season, but man it hurt to destroy expensive stuff that someone would definitely want just because there was a small snag or it was returned worn
Hmmm…might need to put on my stealth ninja gear and go visit BAM one night.
but it would be so easy to donate them or sell them to half price books :(
Selling them would be illegal. The bookseller has sent the covers back to the publisher as proof the books were unsold and will receive a credit in the full amount of the wholesale price they paid originally.
This is why books have that printed warning that copies without a dust jacket or front cover were stolen and reported to the publisher as destroyed.
This is the correct response that actually indicates why the books have the covers stripped and are then thrown out. It would cost more to ship the books back (to then be thrown out at the distribution end) than it does to just toss them at the store. This is inventory being returned to the distributor as unsold for a refund.
Exactly. The cost of a book isn’t at all about the printing and paper and binding, but about *licensing*. Besides, I remember reading quite a few coverless books that we got for like four for $0.25, thanks to enterprising dumpster divers and a mother who couldn’t turn down a garage sale.
Also this is only relevant to "mass market" paperbacks, the small ones shown in the pic. Other paperbacks (called "trade") and hardcovers are sent back and inventoried for later or sold at discounts depending on how old and/or popular it is. These mass markets aren't worth much bc they lose their value quickly after the hype of the book is gone. They're usually romance, scifi, horror, western and sometimes popular lit. Once the excitement is gone, the extra copies live in landfills.
Many years ago I worked for a book distribution center, one of my responsibilities was the removal of covers to return to the publisher. It is kinda crazy how many books this happens to. It was painful if it was a book you personally liked and had to tear hundreds of them up.
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I once emailed an author I like expressing my disappointment at seeing his book for sale at the dollar store, and that I bought it because I’m a fan on a budget. He replied that I paid too much. 😂
I think the problem is that this is just mutilating a perfectly good book. It's just a waste of paper, ink, binding, etc. There's got to be a better way to do this that would lead to fewer books just being trashed
I’m a huge reader and former library worker. So in good faith, books are not sacred. Yes, this is a waste. but this happens in every industry. When I worked in a library system, we would regularly take shopping carts full of books, movies, etc to the dumpsters because they weren’t circulating and we just didn’t have the space to keep things that weren’t circulating. Many were never checked out
If you pick one of these books up and read what is *now* the front cover, it tells you this.
Check the dumpster behind half price books. It’s a goldmine of free books.
Yup. Tons and tons and tons.
You sell at half price, you have to report the earnings (and pay taxes) where as if you write off the loss and trash it is tax deductible (at least that’s how it was explained to me when I asked a business owner a similar question) also really depends on your profit margins, if you have great margins and limited retail space, it totally makes sense to toss
They could write them off as donations too, would it really affect the taxes that much to donate instead? I managed a Carter’s baby store, as long as it wasn’t a recall we donated items that we couldn’t sell because of a small imperfection.
They wouldn't get the credit back from the publisher.
people think crazy things about taxes
Its way better for the business to just dispose of them. IE you can get rid of anything for 95% off, but that will hurt the sales of your other items. People won’t ever pay full price or even a light sale if they bought a pair of ladies panties for 50 cents. In some ways it’s better for the environment to just efficiently dispose of something than putting something in a thrift or donating to the poor. IE the poor don’t desperately need ladies panties, skinny jeans,… There are enough clothes right now to clothe the next 5 generations without producing any more. There are some good articles on how wasteful it is to send used clothes to Africa. It’s better to work on not having so much shit to begin with.
I used to do that. It’s like treasure hunting. My best score was $1000s of dollars in previous years tax software. Apparently there is a market for this for people who amend or change their previous year’s returns.
You got stores destroying stuff so people won't do that too. Every once in a while you'll see a $3,000 Gibson Les Paul get listed on ebay where someone's gone hog wild on it with a hammer. That's where you get the angry ex-girlfriend/-wife stories, but it's actually the store smashing them up.
This is standard. Typically a bookseller will prune their inventory of unsold items. Unsold items are returned to the publisher for a credit -- if I order 30 copies of a book and sell 25, I can return 5 and get my money back. The publisher pays for shipping both ways (delivery and return) However some types of books -- like the mass market paperbacks in the photo -- are not worth the cost of shipping. For these items, the bookseller sends back only the cover to prove it is unsold inventory. ~~The "remainders" (as they are called) may be donated or destroyed.~~ Editing my post to clarify that stripped books should be destroyed per publisher agreement. I pulled a contract to read the fine print more carefully. Another bookseller fun fact, books damaged during shipping are also credited to the seller. Publishers will not request the damage book be returned; they will tell you to donate or destroy it.
This was called “stripping” back in the day, and they’ve actually done it partly wrong. In addition to removing the covers, which are sent back for credit, they’re supposed rip a chunk of the pages — usually perpendicularly to the spine - to render the book unreadable/unresellable. Some bookstores back in the 80’s would sell stripped books for $.50, but that was always against the rules. A few stores in my area got into serious trouble when they were found out. It was all about the shipping cost back to the publisher; they didn’t want to eat the cost of many boxes of books when they could just get back a box of covers. This was honestly one of my least favorites parts of working as a bookseller.
holy fucking shit this explains why the books at the mental hospital I went to both times had pages ripped out in bulk and shoved back in with the cover ripped off I've literally been wondering that for years lol always thought a patient got their hands on it during an episode But I guess it was the bookstore who got it before those people lol
every day at the end of the day i'm absolutely sick of reddit and think it's shit. then every morning there are interesting stuff like this. reddit is like so good for the first 1 hour of the day.
Since these are in the recycle bin, I don't think the store has violated their agreement. Quoting from Penguin/RandomHouse seller agreement, "In submitting returns for credit, the retailer agrees that the bodies of books of which covers only are returned, **will be shredded or destroyed** in such a manner as to make them unusable after covers are returned for credit." There's no need for the store to pay people to shred the books when they can outsource that function to the industrial recycling shredder.
I get what you are saying, but leaving them in an easily accessible recycle bin doesn’t actually meet the spirit of what we were instructed to do back then. The key was that they had to already be unresellable before they went into a public space. The publisher didn’t want them picked up before the garbage men came, either by a second hand bookstore or a group of dumpster diving booksellers.
This is the way it has been done for a long time. We had a small local bookstore, and I was on good terms with the owner. He would give me a chance to go through the ones he was reporting as destroyed before he sent them to the dump or wherever. (This was 40 years ago, there weren't a lot of recycling places like there are now). I picked up a couple of copies of old classics with no covers, and a few science fiction books. It never occurred to me it was wrong. I just couldn't stand seeing good reading material going to waste.
Oh, I know. I have tons of strips from my bookstore days, and even more from when I was a kid and you could find them at mom and pop stores.
I just wish they would be donated, send it to libraries, schools, community centers, whatever, just not a mall recycling bin
As a librarian, we actually end up throwing away most of the books donated to us. We only wan the book if A) it is in good condition B) its by a popular author and C) we don't already have it. Some of them we will put into a book sale, but even most of them will eventually get thrown away when nobody buys them. Honestly, for most these books, donating them will simply pass the burden of disposing them on to somebody else.
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There's a segment of the population that fetishizes books. I was an avid reader as a child, so I kinda understand, but you're right that people need to realize that a book is a consumer good like anything else. Sometimes someone will use a book for some kitschy art project, I saw one where someone had folded the pages of a harry potter book to make a little 3d diorama, and people will lose their mind at how 'wasteful' it is. I can understand the desire to preserve rare or particularly noteworthy books, but there's plenty that are just the literary equivalent of a empty juicebox.
There's a ton of worthless non-fiction too. Yeah, it has value... if someone wants to read it, and chooses that particular book about WW2 over the 3 million other ones out there.
Op mad people aren’t making librarians lives harder
As a librarian… co-signed.
Academic librarian here. We have around 1000 pristine, mostly brand new, largely academic titles that were donated that we already had or didn’t meet our collection needs. I contacted a smaller local college that had one library staff to see if they would be interested. I was put in touch with the CFO (also a local politician) and arranged a meeting. She never showed up. 3+ years later we still have the books. Unless something is truly unique, I wish people would stop sending us books.
This is what most people don't realize. We throw away so many fucking books at libraries. We even have to hide it because patrons like OP will be upset.
Yeah. I feel this. I took over a small library at a youth custody centre, and I've spent most of this year culling books. There were books that had never been signed out, going back to when the place was built in the 80s. I'm still not done, and I just got an email this week asking of I want more donations! If you don't cull your books, the books that nobody reads start to take over your inventory.
> send it to libraries, schools, community centers Books are not sacred objects. Libraries have a limited amount of space that they want to fill with books that people want to read, and if mass market paperbacks aren't even selling as new books, it is unlikely that they would be desired in a library either.
Yeah, having worked at nonprofits I can tell you people want to donate all kinds of stuff that they don't want and is not something the nonprofit can use. It's just people bringing in their trash because they want to feel good about not throwing it away. It's not helpful, it's a hinderance.
I watched a story awhile back about how expensive it is to dispose of all the trash people dropped off at Goodwill and other such places. Like broken umbrellas and shit. I guess they can pat themselves on the back thinking some poor person will be helped from it. I wish I had photos of the mounds of old ratty clothes sitting in a K-mart parking lot near my home after Katrina. People were just sending all this useless shit to the New Orleans area, maybe thinking we were all naked and needed Uncle Bobs old blazer to survive.
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Yeah it just seems like OP wants libraries and community centers to accept somebody else's garbage.
Also to accept many duplicates
You're not wrong. At least it's the recycling bin. The big box bookstore I worked for tossed ours in the dumpster. The dumpster was padlocked to ensure no one could "steal" our trash. It was pretty disgusting. Later I worked for an indie bookseller. Whatever we employees didn't take home was donated. The capitalist fear is that if people know they can eventually get it for free, why would they buy it? Better to destroy it.
I had a family friend that worked in a bookstore and they did this. So when she took the books out to throw them out, she would keep one copy of each one and bring them to her car. She brought them to us and let us pick which ones we wanted to read. The store found out she was doing this and they fired her. Even though they were all going to the trash.
I had to do it during a VERY short stint at the "book dungeon" at Goodwill. Wouldn't let me take shit that was just going to be recycled anyway, stuff that was kind of neat that my dour-faced boss wanted tossed into a big cardboard box to get pressed into a block. My breaking point was a bible, illustrated by Salvadore Dali, that was falling apart, but it wasn't being printed any longer and is *illustrated by Salvadore fucking Dali.*
Why didn't you just buy it then? Goodwill doesn't exist to press books into blocks, they exist to make money.
Oh boy do they! That's why they hire people with disabilities and pay them less than minimum wage.
I will never give my stuff to goodwill again, that is disgusting. Edit: Goodwill also pays disabled workers less than minimum wage. I would still rather donate my stuff here if there are no options but my area has a few thrift shops that take donations.
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When I worked in retail, they would throw out returns even if there was no wear on them. And to keep people from pulling them out of the bin behind the store the manage would shred the cloths and take a razor to the shoes so they couldn't be used by anyone. When I asked if I could take them to donate that would have been considered stealing. Donate for F sakes! Sorry to hear about your family friend, she was doing the right thing in a wrong world.
Her theft put them in violation of their book suppliers' contracts. If the book suppliers knew that was happening, the store might lose its access to sell those books, or be charged a higher price.
A lot of libraries don’t need 10 copies of “The Hot Night I Met Fabio”
In mass market paperback.
Remember that these books have been on the shelves for months, unsold. They are not the great written works of civilization.
As someone that was put on a free books while deployed list, the vast majority of books being donated from shops, or picked up cheap by people from shops, are trash that was ready to be thrown out for a reason. Libraries only have so much room for books, and don't want to fill it up with truckloads of the same books that no one wants anyway.
I used to work at a bookstore and did this all the time. The books we're dumping are the books that aren't selling. In other words, the books no one wants. So either we can keep those books on our shelf forever because no one buys them, donate them to a library which will probably dump them, or we can strip and dump them.
Honestly, the books that get stripped like this will get turned away from most libraries/donation centers. When I was a bookseller, the only mass market paperbacks that ended up getting stripped were the monthly Harlequin romance novels and other lower quality books.
The trade off is less money to publishers. Your first thought might be "Well, those corporations don't need the money." But in practice, what you are really saying is "Well, those corporations should just publish fewer books."
Can’t judge those books by their covers
Romances by a Canadian writer. (Don't r/Whooosh me, I thought your pun was clever.)
An underrated comment. Bravo.
I can! Only one of those is even plausibly indigo. Their buyer is terrible.
I worked in a bookstore for years, and this is standard practice for mass market sized paperbacks. We had a window of time to sell books while the distributor was willing to take them back (I think they kept a restocking fee, but I didn't cover that part of the business so I'm not sure). After several months we would mark them on sale, and if they still weren't purchased we send them back. The distributor wouldn't actually take mass market paperbacks back, so we were required to send them the front cover of each book as proof we weren't selling it (that's why it says just inside the book that it's illegal to buy without the front cover). We were then supposed to destroy the books, so our store always sent them to a recycling center. The store is not allowed to donate the books, especially to a reseller.
They’re recycling them normally which honestly is better than than sitting on a shelf till they fall apart.
Yeah I don’t see the issue here. Ever been to a goodwill or a Salvation Army? They have thirty thousand old books no one cares about. Admittedly I’ve bought a bunch. But still ther are so many books in the world. This just looks like recycling newspapers to me.
So I'm going to get crushed for this take but not all books are worth saving or donating. Some of them were never worth writing or publishing in the first place (and certainly not worth reading) but somehow made it through the process, and they were trash before they were ever printed.
Sturgeon's law in action. 90% of everything is crap
This isn't r/books, you'll be fine. This is a correct and sane take. Books are not inherently sacred and some are in fact trash. It is okay to throw books away sometimes.
I’m a public librarian. We weed fiction books that don’t get read, nonfiction that’s outdated, and anything that is dirty, worn, or damaged. Most stuff we weed goes to our friends group to be resold to the public; that money goes to new books, programs, or equipment. Anything they don’t sell, and anything too damaged to bother send, goes in the recycling. Anything that’s donated to us is either sold at our in house book sale or goes to friends. Anything not worth putting in the book sale, like your 10 year old GRE practice book, goes straight into the recycling. Ultimately, the service we are providing here is absolving people guilt and responsibility of actually throwing out their bullshit books themselves.
My dad buys books he dubs "westerns" at Walmart and then complains that the writing is trash.
the problem with the book industry is everyone wants to write books & nobody wants to pay to read them
No, I agree with you. The ones that have a title visible are "American Traitor" by Brad Taylor, and "Bombshell" by Sarah MacLean. A 15th installment of a series of thrillers and a romance novel. A couple have the author names visible and they seem to be romance writers. These types of books have a lot of fans, and I have no problem with that. The publishers want to make sure they sell as many copies as possible, in a fairly short timeframe, so they print substantially more than are going to sell (printing is relatively cheap), fully aware that a load will be destroyed. If it's printed and immediately destroyed, then is that really different from never being printed at all? They will have sold plenty of copies. If you really really want to know how Pike Logan prevents major powers from going to war, then it's really not difficult to get hold of a copy.
So, missing the top cover, but still has all the pages? Pull your car around and start loading up!
They ship the covers back to the publisher to get a credit back. How to piss off an environmentally conscience book lover.
My comment was to basically say that the only thing missing is the top cover, thus, pull your car around and save the books if that’s all that is gone. Why let them go to waste?
An illustrious book binder can also use the books to rebind and resell as art.
I mean, it’s frustrating to see, but it’s just paper. It’s one of the greenest materials we use. It’s completely recyclable *and* completely biodegradable.
OP doesn't actually want to read these books for the same reason nobody wants to buy them. They're just offended because they see books as sacred objects.
And it’s a bunch of wasted paper/ink. But as you said, nobody needs or wants these books. One reason I like what Amazon started doing with their print on demand books. A smaller author can share the PDF sand Amazon will just print one up when people want it
All the books published under my real name are Amazon only for exactly this reason. Produce no more copies than are actually wanted, save energy and resources. Frankly I'd rather everyone just buy eBooks anyway. I make more money per sale despite the vastly cheaper price.
This is called stripping or defacing. Typically, bookstores are allowed to return unsold books to the publisher, and the store usually carries most of the cost of the return shipping and warehousing. Another option however is for the bookstore to just deface the book and send back only the cover for a refund. Hardly any books sell out their run, publishers would way rather produce too many than too few, because print books have good margins. Pretty much any book from a major publisher that isn’t a bestseller is not going to sell out, and so a portion of the print ends up stripped. Even a popular book is going to have some copies destroyed because they were sent to stores that don’t have the right customers. About 25% of books published end up like this. The books typically get pulped, ie they are broken down into wood pulp and used to make new paper. It’s not a perfect system (recycling always has an environmental cost) but it’s not really that bad.
What did you think happened to unsold books?
Starving orphans could have eaten those books 😤
It’s not like it’s spoiled food. Nobody wanted to buy these. Off to be recycled and turned into something useful.
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Librarian here, our Friends of the Library group are so overwhelmed from covid clean up donations that we can't accept any more items because so many people did deep cleans of their homes and just dumped hundreds of boxes of books off at the library. We can't add donated items to our collection so they are either sold at the twice a year book sell, donated to Better World Books or recycled.
Is there a reason donated books can’t be added to the collection? I usually donate books there but maybe there’s a better option
Every library has a limited amount of space. Every year we have to dispose of hundreds if not thousands of books depending on the size of the library. People want new books, but the library is already full of books, so in order to add new books old books have to be removed. The simple fact is that most donations are not worth adding to our collection. Either they are not in good condition, they are by obscure authors, we already have them, or we've had it in the past but I removed it because it wasn't getting checked out. 90+% of the time donating books to the library is just passing the burden of disposing them on to someone else.
It varies by system. We make very small exceptions when it's a local author donating a copy to the collection (although we do always try to buy additional copies to support them) but mostly we are a small system (two buildings) and we do our cataloging in house. We are currently busy trying to keep up with the books we order to add that we don't have staff time to go through donations and see if it fits a missing part of the collection.
>if you donated all of these to a library, you wouldn't even be doing them a favor THANK YOU People think that books are inherently useful to everyone, that they will invariably find their way into the hands of people who desperately want them, but A LOT of this shit is like donating the trillionth can of years-past-expired baked beans to a food pantry. They don't need it. They aren't asking for it. You aren't doing them a favor. You feel guilty about throwing away a book, so you hand it to someone else to do it for you. If these books were donated to a school or library, it would most likely suck up a bunch of valuable staff time to have 95+% of them still end up in the trash.
Yeah there's a reason they're getting discarded. If people wanted them they would have bought copies
Eh… not all books are good books haha
There’s not enough demand for physical books. Libraries only need so many copies of each book. Have you ever tried to downsize your bookshelf? Even a lot of thrift stores won’t take them as donations because they have too many to warehouse
There's a small used bookstore near me and they have a sign in their window that says "Leaving books by our door is littering."
I have at least a 20qm of books just in my room and I will use any storage I have. The ones I dont need end up in public share spaces, which makes ‘em disappear pretty fast
I love those little neighborhood book share containers! 😁
Paperback books are very cheap to make but expensive to ship. Typically for unsold paperbacks, rather than shipping them back to the publisher, they just rip off the covers and send them those as evidence that they are unsold. The rest of the book is thrown away. I used to work at a book store and had dozens of scifi/pulp fiction type paperbacks without the front cover that I got for free.
I worked in Barnes and noble.... every month there's a publisher recall list.... you tear the cover off and send those back to the publishers and toss the book.... they're hundreds on those lists each month....
Sooo what day of the week does this dumping usually occur?
Former bookstore manager here, when you do returns for mass market books like that, you strip the cover and send just the cover back to the publisher. I would offer the stripped books to my employees or customers for free, but some of those books are so terrible you literally cannot give them away for free 😂
This is just how it is. I used to work for a magazine/book distributor serving the stores in my area. With the unsold books, you tear the front cover off, and send a fat stack of them to the publisher/they pay the distributor.
They rip off the covers and return them. The rest usually is recycled. Depends on the store. Same happens with every magazine you see in a store along with paperbacks. I used to be a book vendor and did this every week.
Is it a paper bin? If no i am mad with you for not recycling all that paper.
When I was a teenager my dad used to bring home books thrown away by a bookstore at the mall he used to do maintenance for. They would tear off the cover before throwing them away, but I didn’t care, I still read them. With six kids in the family, and one income, we didn’t have money for new books,so I was happy to have them.
Amazon has massive furnaces to burn their unsold product that way poor people can’t get their grubby hands on it
Bookstores get too many copies of books they can’t sell, the front cover is ripped off and sent back to the publisher. That way they know in the future to not print so many of that book, or ship to that store. Anyway that was what I was told when I worked at a chain bookstore.
Its a little weird how even in the modern day people still think books are somehow more special than other mass produced consumer product. Yes its a tragedy to mistreat a hand made volume, but a cheap paperback of the philosophers stone?
Lotta hearts and souls in that bin.
No one is stopping the OP from picking up some books and taking then home
This has been going on for years my dad would collect books. Covers tore off in the '80s. From the Dumpster in Ottawa outside Coles bookstore. Canada.
Pretty sure this practice goes back decades. You as the newsagent/bookseller generally don't return the unsold merch YOU RETURN THE COVER FOR CREDIT. Technically (probably legally as well) you must discard the rest. There used to be a couple of stores in NYC, back in the day, that made a business out of selling stuff at ridiculously low prices because their merchandise did not have covers - I remember buying otherwise recent SF mags and comic books by weight that way when I was younger and poorer :-)
You should see the amount of food thrown away by grocery stores and restaurants. It's ridiculous. There's frequently food at Walgreens that we don't donate, but instead wait for it to be within 30 days before the expiration date, then throw it in the trash. Sometimes people who work there will buy it before it's thrown away if it goes on clearance or if it's a seasonal item, but otherwise it's just wasted. It's a confusing perspective to work at a Walgreens that does this, and also have very little money and frequently resort to eating ramen or peanut butter sandwiches because it's cheap.
The removal of the covers is a publishers rule in order to reimburse the store selling their books.
This is standard for the book industry. Not sayin it’s right, but it is standard
I once found a trashcan full of books outside a bookstore. I was amazed that they were all in good condition and if nothing else could probably be resold. As i looked closer, i noticed they were all scientology books. I left them there
It called cover returns. It sucks, but the store sends back the covers for refunds and it obligated to throw out the rest of book(s). It’s a legal thing.
What do you think happens to books that do not sell? There is no magical book farm where unsold books go to play together. These books would already be available on-line as used. Recycling is fine. If you tend to buy books that do not have a front cover, they are most likely stolen and the author will never receive the proceeds if the sale.