Used Books

I found this piece at Slate unexpectedly fascinating. It's written by a guy who makes a living selling used books online. He spends 80 hours a week scavenging books, using a PDA scanner that alerts him to the value of the books he's looking at. Perhaps I found it particularly interesting because I realized that I'm the flip side of this guy: I buy most of my books used online now, helping to create a market for people like this man, whom many in society judge as abhorrent, as depicted in this passage from his essay:

If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work? I'm not the only one who feels this way; I see it in the mien of my fellow scanners as they whip out their PDAs next to the politely browsing normal customers. The sense that this is a dishonorable profession is confirmed by library book sales that tag their advertisements with "No electronic devices allowed," though making this rule probably isn't in the libraries' financial interest. People scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops as well, though this hasn't happened to me yet.

I've had just one confrontation while doing my job, with an elderly man in a suburb. We were in the library's book-sale room when I overheard him telling his friend that the two of them were surrounded by a-------—that is, the people scanning. "It's a business," I said, but I felt all locked up and couldn't bear to turn and say it to his face. "This is a library!" he spat. "You don't work here—you don't work at the library!" He told me that he had 10,000 books in his house, and that he'd read them all. A dozen other people kept scanning silently. Later on, in the parking lot, I got some empathy from my comrades, but they quickly started to speak about their work with the same hunching defensiveness I had put on with my challenger.