{"id":9447,"date":"2017-05-18T12:24:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-18T16:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=9447"},"modified":"2017-05-18T12:24:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-18T16:24:00","slug":"the-process-behind-penny-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=9447","title":{"rendered":"The Process Behind Penny Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Nosowitz\u00a0explores the threat and delight of selling cheap used books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point in the next two to three years, I predict that \u2018Go Set a Watchman\u2019 will be selling for a penny,\u201d says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based used-book seller Thriftbooks, which sells 12 million books a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are taking garbage [and] running it through a very sophisticated salvage process in our warehouses, to create or find or discover products people want, and then we sell them at a very, very cheap price,\u201d Ward explains. Garbage isn\u2019t a value judgment: His company, along with several other enormous used-book-selling operations that have popped up online in the past decade, is literally buying garbage. Thrift stores like Goodwill receive many more donations than they can physically accommodate. Employees rifle through donations, pick out the stuff that is most likely to sell and send the rest to a landfill. The same thing happens at public libraries; they can take only as many donations as their space and storage will allow, so eventually they have to dispose of books, too. (For libraries, the process is a little more complicated; they can\u2019t legally sell books, so they essentially launder them through groups with names like Friends of the Library, which sell the discards and donate the proceeds to the library.)<\/p>\n

Operations like Thriftbooks step in and buy these landfill-bound books, sight unseen, for around 10 cents a pound.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve still got too many books that aren’t selling on Amazon. It may be time they visit the landfill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Nosowitz\u00a0explores the threat and delight of selling cheap used books. \u201cAt some point in the next two to three years, I predict that \u2018Go Set a Watchman\u2019 will be selling for a penny,\u201d says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based used-book seller Thriftbooks, which sells 12 million books a year. \u201cWe are taking garbage … Continue reading The Process Behind Penny Books<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[3243],"class_list":["post-9447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookselling","tag-used-books"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}