Book Board Chat

Bad Manners at the FOL Sale

At an FOL Book Sale you'll find dog-eared classics, homemade apple pie and maybe a fistfight. Recently “I saw it first!" has risen to a whole new level. Armed with electronic ISBN scanners and Santa-sized loot bags, people who resell books on the Internet camp outside the door, shove others out of the way and cover piles of valuable books with blankets. "They want to come in and crash the place," said the president of the Friends of the Public Library.

So as volunteers dust off the shelves for this autumn's round of book sales, they have found ways to ward off pushy buyers while still making a profit. Some sales are now only one day instead of three, so online booksellers have less time to raid their shelves. "It was chaos," one volunteer said. “They blocked fire exits, beeped hundreds of books with scanners that tell a book's value and left the discards strewn across the floor.”

"It was becoming very obnoxious," said another FOL volunteer in a nearby city. Some of them don't have the nicest personalities and the influx of sellers discourages local traffic“, she said. "They kind of come and try to hog the books," said the assistant director of a library, explaining how she's seen them "scooping books up and piling them up for later."

Libraries now have many anti-bookseller tactics: some hand out a sheet of rules, others outlaw electronic scanners, and some ask aggressive buyers to leave. And an ambitious few sell online themselves. Many libraries have a special pre-sale only for Friends of the Library. But booksellers simply pay the FOL joining fee.

Still, libraries appreciate the profit. "We're happy to have someone buying 100 books," Most people connected to area libraries agreed. "The average person spends $8 to $10 and the bookseller is spending hundreds," said the president of the Friends of the Library.

People can find lists of library sales online at websites such as http://www.booksalepirate.com, http://www.booksalemanager.com, and http://www.booksalefinder.com."Books are the plunder we pirates seek," says booksalepirate.com. Tom Oram, the creator of booksalefinder.com, said he and his wife just want to help other bookworms, but knows his site aids booksellers. He posts libraries' rules on his site. "No hoarding," says one library. "No grabbing shelves full of books," says another library.

His all-time favorite library rule? "You can't make our volunteers cry."

The Complete Article
http://www.milforddailynews.com/archive/x26166355/Booksellers-crash-the-party-at-local-libraries#ixzz1ZCEzLHfP