This guy goes to library sales and thrift stores, scans books on his smartphone and buys the ones that have a high rating. He then turns around and sells them on Amazon. He doesn’t read them or even particularly like books from what I gathered.
He wrote an interesting article about how even though this is his job, he still feels guilty about it some times and has even been confronted at a library sale for what he was doing.
Here’s the article. Go read it.
Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
Now tell me what you think. Is this alright? Not alright? Helpful? Annoying?
(And yes, I’m up at 4 a.m. looking at stupid stuff on the internet and blogging. Isaac is sleeping peacefully. There’s no reason that I’m up other than I’m a complete idiot. I’ll be hating myself for this tomorrow. Also, I just ate a brownie. Ugh.)
3 Comments
I loved this – I think it’s truly brilliant.
lol.
Shoot, I wish I had a Dell PDA – I’d be scanning like crazy come Saturday morning (it’s the library sale’s free book day). Shoot, I may just grab bags full just to give it a shot.
Seriously, I find nothing wrong with what he’s doing. It sounds like a fun job to me
I kinda do this with books I think I can swap on PBS. They have to be cheap though, to make it worth it.
We have a fair amount of people that do this at our library sale. So, we got a scanner too, to make sure we were pricing things at the right level.
I’m torn about how I feel about it. I’ve picked up books at the library sale that I knew I could trade for more credit at another used book store or trade on PBS. But I read another blogger’s post about this where he mentioned he had seen people who do this for a living go to library sales and cover entire sections with sheets to try to keep other patrons from getting books before they can scan them. I would be annoyed by something like that. But as long as they’re paying they have just as much right to be there as anyone else, regardless of how they plan to use the books.