It's not as bad as it was back in the olden tymes, when people valued their books and thought of them as something other than heavy, annoying burdens to jettison in the interest of soaring ever skyward in pursuit of diaphanous, angelic ebooks flitting between the clouds, but I still get a few every week.
Gal comes in with pure junk, old, tired Evangelical stuff we couldn't give away for free. There's a whole industry pumping out that kind of stuff, and it has absolutely zero value on the secondary market- it's nearly as bad as vanity press stuff from shady you pay us to print your book! publishers.
I found a nice kids book in the pile, pulled it out of the bog and left the rest. The lady was bemused at my lack of enthusiasm.
"Did you see the ones on the bottom?"
"Yep!"
"Because those are really good books. When I was looking for them, they were really expensive."
"Mmm. We've never had any luck selling them, sorry. I'm sure they're fine books."
"I'm just really surprised."
"Mmmm."
It rarely pays to engage on this topic.
Very few people are genuinely interested in the thought process behind why you rejected their books, they just want you to buy them. So they'll tell you how great it is, how much it cost them, blah blah blah.
That may all be true, who knows.
What I do know is the quality of a book does not always (or even usually) reflect its saleability, witness the current popularity of painfully derivative, nearly unreadable Twilight series.
And what someone paid for a book has nothing to do with how we'll price it.
Even assuming a title is saleable, the price will vary from shop to shop, and what you can pay for a title is dictated directly by how much you expect to sell it for. A specialized art book has more value in a shop that specializes in art books & attracts that clientele than in a shop specializing in lit, etc. A regular comment while pricing is "I should be pricing this XXX", said while penciling in some fraction of XXX.
A book is worth exactly what a customer will pay for it. You can price it whatever, but only if you don't mind keeping it.
A modern wrinkle is well, this sells for a million dollars on the INTERNET!
Happily, it's a statement that makes its own sauce- "Great, then you can sell it online!"
What folk don't get is I'd LOVE it if their stuff was all great and valuable and salable- I really like buying good books, and I don't especially like rejecting crummy ones. I like paying real money for great books. I could sort through good books all day long then run a marathon, but ten minutes of sifting junk makes me want to take a nap.
But if a title isn't good for the shop, I'm passing on it.
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