This weekend, as part of a garage clearing exercise, I took two bags of CDs and books to my local used bookstore to sell. The books were mostly a collection of my own and Na Clann (but I go through everything they want to get rid of and keep back some of them for the future), the CDs entirely mine for a musical class I no longer listen to (Probably worth a posting all on its own, but I scarcely listen to a CD anymore - or if I do, it is classical music).
It was a busy day at the bookstore for selling (as it often is on a weekend), so I wandered the shelves for the better part of an hour, pulling books out and setting them back in. It is always, at least in my mind, a good practice to scope out what I might be interested in in case I have a little extra money or a coupon (As Erasmus said, "If I have a little money I buy books, and if I have anything left over I buy food and clothes".).
They finally called my name. Final tally: $6.25.
For the first time ever selling books, I became a little irritated.
Mind you, I understand the concept. Everyone makes money. Buy low and sell high. And the things I am selling may or may not be in demand.
Still, 2 bags. I cannot estimate the total of what was in that bag, but I bet the value ran somewhere near $400 at time of purchase.
$6.25.
It was a poignant reminder of what I have always lectured my children, what was painfully driven home to me time and time again in real estate: The value something has is what it is worth to the buyer, not what the seller believes it to be.
If you think about it on a larger scale, this sort of thing has become embedded in our culture. People come into jobs seeing themselves worth a great deal more than (typically) what a company is willing to pay to meet a need. Or everything that is on the InterWeb for sale, priced at what the seller thinks it should be worth (because they paid that much plus it has been 20 years, you know).
It is not like I was going to take it all back of course, so I signed my slip and got my $6.25.
On my way out the door, I reconsidered the book I had possibly identified as one to buy, one I had been considering for some months. The cost, with tax, would have been more than I received from the books. Two bags, reduced to a single book.
I put it back. I can wait for a 50% coupon.
My uncle went through the same thing when his wife passed away. He was a hotshot university prof, she was a clinical psychologist. Over the years their library became massive and they’d published a few themselves - back in the days when that meant something. When he went to get rid of the books... he couldn’t sell them at all. Nobody wanted them. He ended up taking them round to the homeless shelters and dropping them off at any charity that would take them.
ReplyDeleteIt almost makes me want to go back to books, as a way of raising a middle finger to modern society and its technology...
Glen, there are books I hold on to now purely because I believe that they will never be published again and I am the curator of them.
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason that most bookstores have expired except for the one large Big Box store, and that one is in trouble - they take up space and some many use electronic reading devices. The problem, of course, is that things can be deleted from those devices for any reason...