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.
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.
I guess I'm not such a voracious reader that I'm buying in bulk like that.
Having just done a quick check, I'm surprised there's not!
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.
This is the most common supply-demand and stocking problem across all industries. Surely you don’t think it’s as simple as that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.