6 ms·
Have you ever seen the inside of a book where there's a warning label that says you shouldn't have bought the book if it didn't have a cover? That's for the sa
by munificent 4y ago
Have you ever seen the inside of a book where there's a warning label that says you shouldn't have bought the book if it didn't have a cover?
That's for the same reason. The way books are sold works like this:
1. The publisher prints a whole pile of them.
2. Booksellers order a bunch. Because both publisher and bookseller want to maximize sales and avoid turning away a customer because they don't have enough copies of the book, the bookseller orders more than they expect to sell.
3. Once the sales have tapered off, the bookseller is stuck with unsold merchandise. They could send them back to the publisher, but the last thing in the world the publisher wants is more copies of a product they themselves can mass manufacture. So, instead, the bookseller just destroys them and tells the publisher how many weren't sold so they can be refunded.
4. Of course, a nefarious bookshop could simply claim that the books were unsold and then get to sell books that they didn't pay for and pocket the profit. To prevent that, the publisher requires them to cut the covers off and ship those back. Shipping just the covers is much cheaper than shipping the entire book and serves to ensure that every book was indeed not sold. Then the bookseller trashes the rest of the book.
5. Of course, this scheme only works if the bookseller can't sell a coverless book. So the publisher prints the warning inside the book to remind customers not to buy them like that.
- sparker72678 4y agoTIL
- vorpalhex 4y agoI remember going to several questionable bookshops that sold coverless books quite cheaply (frequently $1/$2 for a lb of books). As a kid it was an excellent way to stock up on books.
- RajT88 4y agoI imagine on the torrent sites there's a demand for book covers you can print yourself. Having just done a quick check, I'm surprised there's not!
- culturestate 4y agoI suspect that if you’re the type of person who might think to torrent a book cover, you’d probably just torrent the whole book.
- im3w1l 4y agoThe implication is that a bookseller would print them so they can sell their "unsold" books.
- wiml 4y agoThat's a fair amount of effort, expense (printing), and labor (assembly) just to try to sell a book that you've already determined isn't selling very well!
- quickthrower2 4y agoIt might also be fraud where selling a coverless books is just breach of contract? IANAL but would be interested in finding out
- actuallyalys 4y agoI suppose you could do it for books that were selling well, but they might get suspicious if your bookstore was the only one.
- bombcar 4y agoYou can usually download high res covers from Amazon if you want.
- lttlrck 4y agoJust like the album cover scrapers of yore (and probably still...)
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
- NoPiece 4y agoWhen I was a kid I had a nice cache of coverless books I'd retrieved from the trash bin behind the local Crown Books.
- grensley 4y agoSelling books by the pound sounds sacrilegious to me. I guess I'm not such a voracious reader that I'm buying in bulk like that.
- mgiampapa 4y agoYou can also buy books by the linear foot. Apparently when WFH got going big time it caused a huge spike in demand as people wanted filled bookshelves as a backdrop for video calls.
- MinorTom 4y agoWow. I remember reading about buying books by the foot in a communist satire book, I didn't expect reality to catch on that quickly.
- jancsika 4y ago> So the publisher prints the warning inside the book to remind customers not to buy them like that. But the publisher's warning also verifies that it's a bona fide copy. Just imagining... Dear downloader: please make sure the file with the sha1 hash fingerprint "34973274" is accompanied with a physical copy of our famous hologram logo sticker. If you don't have the sticker then STOP-- do not open the program to view the contents.
- davrosthedalek 4y ago??? A non-bona-fide copy would have a copy of the warning as well, wouldn't it?
- kzrdude 4y agoYou'll have to verify the digital signature with pen and paper though, and call their hotline for their key.
- quickthrower2 4y agoOr NFT?
- bergenty 4y agoIn India, they just make new covers that are a fraction of the cost (paper, print is always out of alignment).
- monktastic1 4y agoThat's neat! One thing that's not immediately obvious to me: why does the publisher make that deal with the bookseller? Since it's in the seller's best interest to sell as many copies as possible anyway, why not let them eat the cost of ordering too many? I suppose the answer is simply to help publishers entice sellers; to give sellers a guarantee that helps them avoid that worry. Still, I wouldn't have predicted it.
- jeshin 4y agoI guess otherwise book stores might order more conservatively, which might result in less sales
- yunohn 4y ago> why not let them eat the cost of ordering too many? This is the most common supply-demand and stocking problem across all industries. Surely you don’t think it’s as simple as that?
- munificent 4y ago> why does the publisher make that deal with the bookseller? Good question! My understanding is that that's how it used to work. Booksellers would buy as many as they wanted and sales were final as far as the publisher was concerned. It was on the bookseller to make sure they didn't buy too many. During the Great Depression, bookstores were hit very hard and they didn't buy much. That in turn hit publishers. In order to incentivize bookstores to buy more copies, a couple of the larger publishers began to offer this deal where they would allow returning unsold copies. Booksellers loved it, obviously, since it greatly reduced their risk. Once a couple of publishers did this, the rest were basically pressured to follow since the booksellers so strongly prefered publishers who did. Once booksellers got used to this deal, it became entrenched and now publishers are essentially stuck with it.
- ars 4y agoIt's because printing a book costs almost nothing. The publisher would rather sell one extra book and trash 10, than lose out of that sale.
- alliao 4y agomagazines does it too, anyone remember those shiny publications? printed on high gloss heavy paper, very heavy. what they wanted is just a bag of bar codes then the retailers dump them anywhere they please. it's one thing I'm happy to see die out, the cost of printing and shipping then just dumping is a very wasteful endeavour just to incite further insecurities in their audiences (mostly) so they can advertise more products. Doing it online is much more efficient.
- lobocinza 4y agoSimilar thing with newspapers.
- foobiekr 4y agoWe were tight on money when I was a kid. My favorite times were when my mom would come home with a box of coverless books from the bookstore next to the diner where she worked, bought for like $1 each. I wonder how many other kids had that experience.
- pjc50 4y agoOne of my favourite bookstores before it closed was Galloway and Porter: http://www.bookstoreguide.org/2009/03/galloway-and-porter-cambridge.html http://www.bookstoreguide.org/2009/03/galloway-and-porter-ca... They had remaindered or unsold books, covers intact, usually of an academic nature. But that also included O'Reilly books, and I got several large "coffee table" books of glossy photographs that would usually be £50 but reduced to £2 due to cosmetic damage to the slip cover.
- smn1234 4y agoany alternatives, these days
- solarmist 4y agoI wish I could've had this experience. I guess I grew up in too rural (13k as of 2020) a place to have this. I think there was only a single new book store in our town growing up. The grocery store or school book fairs were the only other places to buy books.
- ivegotnoaccount 4y agoQuite interesting, did not know things worked like this in the US. In France, from my understanding, there is "Les retours" ("The returns"), a system where libraries have one year to send unsold books backs, then the distributor usually dispatch them to their libraries or as a stock for online sales.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoJust FYI, it looks like you've been tricked by a false cognate there: in English, "library" means a place you borrow books (bibliotheque), "bookstore" means place you buy books (librairie)
- ivegotnoaccount 4y agoOops, you're right. Thanks for pointing it out. Strangely, I don't to the mistake when going from English to french. Because I'm more used translating "software library" to "bibliothèque logicielle" than talking about book stores in English. Guess I'll need to pay more attention to it.
- tgv 4y agoOf course, it also only works if the profit offsets the cost. The cost of printing and shipping an extra book is very low. If you apply this to e.g. phones, I think the margins drop rapidly.
- okasaki 4y agoI don't think I've ever seen such a message. I've either missed it or it's not common in the UK.
- solarmist 4y agoI've heard this description before, but I've never seen a cover-less book before. I've seen plenty of books that's become detached from they covers, but not missing entirely.
- munificent 4y agoThat's because most bookstores immediately recycle them after tearing the cover off. You're not supposed to see them.