The Life of a Book

What drives you to buy a book?

Is it the excitement of a new title by your favourite author? Is it the smell of that fresh untouched paper as you flick through the pages? It is a paperback for your holiday?

Normally for the latter, people buy used books from their local charity shop. Book sales for charities rise in the holiday season, as people don’t mind spending a ￡1 or so on a couple of books that they can even leave behind to have room in their cases for souvenirs on the way home. It won’t matter if they get splashed on or sand between the pages. There is far less love and loyalty for the ‘holiday book’. This is often when you may pick up a book you wouldn’t normally buy, this is also where a love affair with a new author can be born. My husband and I swapped books during a holiday back in the 1990’s, since then I have enjoyed crime novels, which was something I hadn’t even thought of before then.

This in turn led me to want to buy other books in that genre. Some years ago that would have even led me to a library, but with the boom of charity shops, people seem to prefer to buy secondhand books rather then try to remember to return books to a library by a set date. Although I think this is also a generation thing, as my parents, their generation and older still seem to be using libraries. I guess with the boom of the internet, children don’t need to go there for reference books and encyclopaedias, sadly the need for libraries has waned.

The Secondhand Book Market

So, not only can people buy their secondhand books from their local charity shop, there is now a huge online market too, take Amazon for example, millions of books from thousands of sellers, some incredibly cheap too. The market & volume is vast and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down as was first predicted when online or virtual versions were introduced just a few years ago. Most people still love the feel of a real book.

Charities often receive vast volumes of books, more then they can cope with. Some open designated book shops, even with a coffee shop inside, to compete with the high street chains. The only problem they have then is having the staff / volunteers, time and space to sort the books into genres, authors or at least some sort of order for selling. Of course when there is a frenzy over a title, such as Harry Potter, 50 Shades etc this means a few months later there is an influx of these titles to the charity shops, they can only sell so many of the same book and they don’t want to fill their shelves with just one or two titles.

This is where companies like Pre-Loved Ltd come in. We love books and will buy them in bulk from charities. This not only helps the charity raise funds from their excess stock, it also reduces landfill and gives the books another life. I find something very wrong about books just being shredded for recycling, even if it is a better option than landfill. Obviously some books arrive to us in such a condition that shredding is the only option, but at least recycling paper is a useful commodity.

We scan all the books that come through our doors, if they can be added to our own library and sold on then that’s what we do. This includes the type of books charities struggle to sell in their shops such as reference books, text books etc which have a niche market. By selling them on line you can reach the whole world and not just the radius of people that travel to your shop. This is also why charities sell through Amazon, Ebay and similar online avenues as well.

For charities that don’t have the volume of book donations, we are able to sell in bulk to them. It may not be as profitable to the charity as donated goods are, but buying by the Kg is still lucrative for them if they didn’t have the stock in the first place.

We also sell abroad to developing countries, that may otherwise not have access to literature, or where schools are trying to teach their children English. These types of schools rarely have the technology that our children are lucky enough to have, if they are lucky they may have just one computer for the whole school, but may not have internet access or other luxuries that we take for granted. Even if the reference books are a few years old or the text books are not the current curriculum, it doesn’t matter to them, they are just pleased to be able to have a book and learn to read it.

The next time that you start a new book, just think about where it may go after you have finished it or if it’s a secondhand book where it has been, there maybe more than the story between the pages for these bounded sheets of paper.

After all books aren’t just for Christmas.......