Agoraphobia is Just Good Thinking

Perhaps I was a little too cavalier about the swine flu in my last post, as there are now three probable cases of it in my county, another four in two other counties, and I have a sore neck and a mild stomachache. I’m sure I’m fine, but just in case, I bequeath all my Nancy Drew video games to NPW because they both go by the name “Nancy.” If any of you are called “Lumpy,” let me know, and I will see to it that you get my couch.

Actually, I always feel a little yucky after a trip to the used bookstore. I love a bargain, but all of that pre-owned stuff in one place gives me the shivers. Also, I haven’t been in one for a while, so my immunity to previously handled page bacteria is low. My only 2008 resolution was to refrain from buying any books, since I already had something like 200 in my to-be-read pile, and I managed to get through last year without buying anything, but it seemed like I also read fewer books than usual so I decided to lift the ban this year. So far in 2009, I have purchased nine books but read only six books, thus this plan is not so great either.

In any case, I went to Half-Price Books this weekend, but it wasn’t one of their better locations. There’s a big store in the University District that I like because if you’re looking for a specific book that’s out of print, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll have it at a normal price instead of at the hugely jacked-up amounts you often see on half.com or AbeBooks. But this time I went to a smaller store located in a strip mall in one of the suburbs with a selection that’s just okay, unless you are a fan of Jude Deveraux or David Baldacci in which case this location would be your version of where good people go when they die. Nonetheless, I managed to find four books that I’ve been wanting for a while, two of them even in new condition, so overall it was a success for me, though not for the authors of those books since they receive no royalties on resales. I feel a little bad about that, actually.

In general, I’m not a fan of this store chain. In the first place, they need to hire a full-time employee whose job it is to shake out the books to remove both the hair of previous owners as well as any paper napkins with mustard on them that previous owners have used as bookmarks. When I am looking through a book deciding if I want to buy it, finding hair and/or mustard inside tends to make it less likely that I will. I would have assumed that was understood, but there has been more than one incident demonstrating that this assumption is unwarranted. Secondly, they need to hire a full-time employee whose job it is to take all the books out in the alley and smell them before offering them for sale. It does no good to try to smell the books inside the store since between the low-rent building, the musty smell of old merchandise, and employees who either do not adhere to a regular shower schedule or who have an inexplicable fondness for excessive amounts of Drakkar Noir, the inside of the store is a collection of rude aromas. Come to think of it, considering how their regular employees smell, maybe the book-smelling job should be subcontracted out.

What I dislike most about the chain is that they’re so cagey about how much they will pay to buy used books from you. I’ve sold books to them on a couple of occasions, and both times they paid less than 10% of the cover price. I wouldn’t mind that so much if they just said, “we pay 8%” or whatever, but of course if they said that, no one would sell them anything. If you ask them how much they pay, they will give a very bullshitty answer about how they determine the price on a book-by-book basis and there is no set percentage that they pay for anything; however, they also say they pay “by the lot,” so taken together, what they are telling you is that they will not tell you. The first time I took a bunch of books in, the guy doing the buying said there were a couple of people ahead of me and I should leave my books and come back in a half hour. I did, and ended up getting about $50 for books that I had originally paid probably $600 for in total. The second time I went in, I decided I’d stand there and watch him price the books so I could see exactly how they were arriving at those amounts. They really do not like when you do that.

“This is going to take me about 15 minutes, so why don’t you browse the store,” suggested the friendly Book Store Employee.

“That’s okay! I can wait!” I cheerfully replied.

“No really, it will be a while. Why don’t you go look around?” responded the slightly less friendly Book Store Employee.

“I’m fine!” I informed him.

“YOU CAN’T STAND HERE. YOU ARE BLOCKING THE COUNTER AND OTHER PEOPLE MIGHT BE BRINGING IN BOOKS.” Hmmm. Someone doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.

I took up a position next to the shelves closest to the counter, pulled a book off the shelf, and proceeded to ignore the book so I could stare at Hostile Book Store Employee pricing my books. Despite all of their talk about supply and demand and market vagaries and whatnot, the highly scientific process they utilize appears to involve placing the books in three piles according to size and then offering to buy them for eight and half cents on the dollar. I went ahead and sold them that time as well, since I’d already schlepped them into the place and really didn’t feel like taking them back home, but I decided it wasn’t worth selling to them in the future.

I had considered using BookCrossing for books I no longer wanted, but if you look around the site you will see that most of its users are unclear on the concept. What’s supposed to happen is that you register a book with them, get an ID number for it, write the ID number in the book, and then set the book free in the wild, and by “in the wild,” they probably mean, “at Starbucks.” Then when someone picks up the book and reads it, they go to the BookCrossing site, note where and when they found it, what they thought of the book, and where they re-released it. In theory, you can follow your book as it passes through the hands of various readers, which I think is kind of a nice idea. But in actuality, what happens is that someone lists a book and releases it, and then a bunch of people who didn’t find the particular book that’s being tracked come in and review the book and by “review,” I mean they say things like, “the plot of the book was good but the part were it is supposed to entertain you was not,” or “this book is very boring its a lot of takling and old poeple,” or “I didn’t read this book.” It looks as if some of the members of BookCrossing have just decided to mail books to one another because the whole “release your book into the wild and watch it travel the world” concept was kind of a bust.

Because selling my old books on Amazon or half.com would require a lot of time and effort that I could better spend by looking at all my new books and saying, “huh. I should read those,” eventually, I decided that I would just donate the books I no longer wanted to the public library. We have an excellent library system and because I use it all the time for movies, I have saved a ton of money in Netflix fees over the last few years, so I’m happy to forgo the $30 or $40 a year I could get from selling the books. If your local library takes book donations, I hope you’ll consider doing this as well because it’s a good way to support an underfunded community service. And the bonus for me is that if my library can’t use the books it receives for its collection, it holds a twice-yearly book sale where donated books and books they’re taking out of circulation get sold at prices only slightly below what you would pay at a used book store. Their biggest customers at these sales are used book sellers, who end up paying the library a lot more than they would pay me for the same book, so I get a perverse sense of satisfaction from knowing that I got the additional 30% out of them after all.