Donated books? Well, maybe not
By Paul Biba
This isn’t directly ebook related, but I found it so interesting that I thought I would give it a mention. You can read the full article here, and if you have one of these blue boxes near you you probably should.
Have you seen those blue book donation boxes that seem to be popping up everywhere? Ever wonder what the deal is?
Well, here’s how it works:
The boxes are are owned and operated by Thrift Recycling Managment (TRM), a for-profit company. This alone should bring into question the ‘Books For Charity’ mantra emblazoned on the front and sides of each box.
To date, about 15,000 boxes have been placed around the country.
51% of books donated end up being pulped. Think revenue stream.
25% go to non-profit organizations committed to various literacy and book-related causes with only a tiny fraction of those books ever making it back to the community they came from.
TRM keeps the remaining books to sell. They claim to be “the largest seller of used books on the Internet,” ….
June 1st, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I’m reminded of when someone at Half Price Books told me, that in addition to the 3-4 books of mine they were willing to buy, they’d take the dozen or so others for ‘recycling.’ Since I’d seen a copy of one of the books to be ‘recycled’ on their shelves, I concluded that recycling really meant being sent to another of their stores for sale. I declined their offer and gave the books away.
In the case of Book Patrol, I suspect that the 25% going to charities are those of only marginal value, while the remaining 24% that they sell online are the most valuable. Cream skimming rather than recycling.
I’d love to see an organization develop that would transport entire shipping containers of the more useful books to poorer countries, where they’d be given to vendors to sell at low prices. It’d do a lot more good than giving kids tiny green computers that cost more than their parents earn in six months.
Why the shipping containers? In the 1980s, I shipped hundreds of books to schools in Bangladesh, India and Zambia at a special bulk rate for books that was about 50 cents a pound. Now the post office tells me I can’t do that, that I have to use something like global priority mail. Shipping costs about 10 times the old price and often more than the new price of a book.
Adding good books to relief shipments and sending them by the container load would get them cheaply to countries that have too few books.
At present, the only way I know to get books overseas cheaply is to send them to someone with a U.S. military APO address in the county. Those rates are the same is shipping inside the U.S. and include a ‘media rate’ that’s not too costly.
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:51 am
Only 50% being pulped? They must be doing something right.