Do used bookstores support working writers?

Or are we robbing them of their livelihood?

Buying books was easier, back in the day. There were fewer options available: you bought them at a bookstore, or a used bookstore, or from a short list of other places such as the library book sale, or a yard sale, or a thrift store. Perhaps you cared about what your choice of book said about you, as a reader or a person, but you didn’t sweat over what your choice of book vendor said about you and your values, as a consumer. Or maybe you did, but I definitely didn’t.

I didn’t really think about the ethics of where my books came from at all until well after Amazon came on the scene, when I was a cash-strapped, book-obsessed twenty-something, and bookstores were starting to disappear. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t think too deeply about it then. I simply didn’t have the capacity. I was too absorbed in the minutiae of my own personal life to truly consider the broader impact of any given purchase I made.

Frankly, even though I’m a little more capable of such analysis now, parsing out the ethical pros and cons of buying books is exhausting, because I find my values are endlessly at odds with each other. For starters, I believe the environment needs preserving, authors deserve fair compensation for their work, and libraries are a critical resource, especially for folks who can’t afford to buy every book they want to read (a.k.a. almost all of us). So…

Do I want to save books from the landfill, by buying used, or do I want to support working authors, by pre-ordering their books from a behemoth like Indigo or Amazon? Do I want to support my local library by checking out books, which costs me nothing, or support an independent bookstore, which will cost me a little more than almost any other option? Is it better to pick up a paperback copy here, near the checkout line at the drug store, or pay the same amount to download it onto my e-reader when I get home? I could go on.

Rather than commit, whole-heartedly, to a single set of values and allowing them to drive my book-buying/borrowing habits, what I end up doing is getting my books from a wild mix of all of the above, and allowing the source of each book on my nightstand to hinge on a bunch of other factors, such as how badly I want to read it, how much spare cash I’ve got, and so on.

Each individual buy or borrow is fully justified in my mind, but if you zoom out, my book acquisition strategy looks like a detective’s murder board, with strings zigging and zagging through a collage of book covers, author photos, account balances, and scrawled notes ending in ???

I’ll never solve this case, at the rate I’m going.

I am deeply envious of those readers who have one set of values that consistently trumps all others, and who are therefore stridently confident in their book acquisition protocol, be it based on financial, environmental, or philosophical factors. That kind of certainty must feel great and while I know I’ll never have it, I don’t begrudge it to others.

I do, however, take exception to a certain subset of those readers who are so confident in their personal rationale that they look down on all others. Specifically, I’m annoyed by readers who say they only buy new because buying secondhand is not supportive of authors—is akin to robbing them, even.

I respectfully disagree.

I mean, it is true that authors do not earn royalties for copies of their books that are sold used. They only earn royalties on the sale of new copies. So yes, used bookstores are literally unsupportive of authors, in the sense that they do not receive so much as a dime from our sales of their books. If this doesn’t sound enough like robbery to you, you could go further, and think of each used book sold as one less new book sold.

But this is, in my opinion, a very narrow view. And I just don’t think it works that way, most of the time.

There are many reasons people shop at used bookstores, but one of the biggies is budget. New books are more expensive than ever, like everything else. A lot of the readers who walk in to our store aren’t choosing between buying a brand-new copy or buying it used, but rather between buying the book used or not buying it at all.

Moreover, most of the books we receive are not new releases. We do get a few—so few that we get excited when a book published during the current calendar year comes in, and we feature it near the front of the store, on the couple of shelves we have reserved for this purpose. This section houses a tiny percentage of what we have in stock. Maybe one percent, if I had to guess.

Most of the books we receive have been stored on their original owners’ shelves for many months or years before they get to us. Decades, even, like this collection of vintage sci-fi paperbacks I quickly took a (bad) photo of, during my last shift.

Books are displayed in our ‘new’ section until they sell or until the calendar year flips over and we need the space for even-newer titles, whichever comes first. At that point, last year’s new releases get shelved elsewhere in the store, by author or genre.

New bookstores, by contrast, only keep a book for as long as it is selling well. After a certain point, the store returns unsold copies to the publisher, to make room on the shelf for even-newer new releases.

I could not find an Official Statistic on the average length of time a bookstore will keep a book that is not selling well, but we’re talking months, not years. Somewhere between three and twelve, according to this very cool yet depressing infographic. After that, those unsold copies are gonzo. Either they are returned to the publisher’s warehouse (where they may well be sold on to bargain book wholesalers such as BookDepot) or pulped.

The number of brand-new titles our store gets while they are still being widely, prominently displayed by the major retailers is tiny. I could probably balance a year’s worth on my head. The reason for this is that most people do not trade in the brand-new, expensive editions they just bought for credit in a used bookstore, because it doesn’t make much financial sense to do that. The few folks who do it, must not be thinking about the dollars and cents of the transaction, but maybe more in terms of sharing their bookshelf wealth rather than hoarding it. These generous readers are amassing some serious bookish karma, I think. Not only did they do their bit for the author, by buying it new, but they’ve totally made another reader’s day.

I can’t speak for all used bookstores but I can tell you, we will keep books for much, much longer than a few months. As G likes to say, we hang onto to them until their readers come along. We don’t toss them out when their fifteen minutes on BookTok are up, to make room for the next new thing. Rather, we will slowly and steadily amass everything a writer has ever written, until sometimes, a reader walks out with the lot, crowing about her good fortune. Or a reader walks out carrying a book he did not come in looking for, a book he might never have found any other way, only to later become one of the author’s super fans. You just never know.

We get to know an author’s body of work over time, because we take inventory by hand. We have to dig through the stacks in search of a requested title, rather than tapping the few words into a computer. We eventually get good at telling re-releases from new releases, and noms-de-plume from authors’ given names.

Some of us get to the point at which we know exactly what the customer wants when they say things like ‘I’m looking for this book, but I can’t remember the author’s name or the title. I want the one before their newest one, or maybe even a few before that, I think there’s a house on the cover?’ (We get queries like this all. the. time.)

Somehow, despite the lack of direct remuneration to authors, nothing about this business feels like robbery, to me. It feels closer to a kindness, or service. I don’t see it as all that different from selling vintage furniture or secondhand clothes.

If buying and selling used books is wrong, I don’t want to be right.