Online Book Auctions : Boon or Menace to Libraries?
Julie Burke, November 21, 2006
Among the many new technologies that challenge librarians to adapt to change is one that I believe deserves more thoughtful attention, because it relates directly to the core purpose of the library: the collection. Online book auctions have fostered emergence of a booming after-market trade in books and media that hasvisibly impacted the business of traditional publishing and bookselling. Some librarians are beginning to notice the ways in which auctionscanimpact ‘traditional’ library services, and sound the alarm, while others embrace and advocate auctions.
I was able to find fourjournal articles published between 2000 and 2006, plus a number of news briefs on library incidents relating to online book auctions. The authors opposing viewpoints about auctions are in brief: 1) book auctions are bad because they make itvery easy for thieves to steal and sell library books and materials, and; 2) book auctions are good because they make itvery easy for librarians buy and sell library books and materials. Auctions are considered to be good and bad for the very same reason by librarians.
Dale Hill, board member and Friend of the Los Gatos Public Library, gleefully and precisely documents her return on investment for selling books online vs. the usual friends store or book sale: Selling 167 books yielded the library $6,700. For slightly over 1 hour of time per book invested in e-selling, the average return was $40, an amount to make you sit up and consider repurposing a technical services clerk. Interestingly, she concludes that using library staff is not profitable, which suggests that Los Gatos pays high salaries even for California. The return at this library may not be typical. Hill reports that the Friends are fortunate to have received very fine collections from donors, including very old books and signed first editions.
Kathleen Baxter, from Anoka County Library in Minneapolis-St, Paul, reports selling one discarded book for over $100 and proudly claims ‘we’re in the used book business.’ Like Hill, Baxter also reports in detail on how to run a successful resale operation, but she takes a middle course and recognizes that there is a dark side to the practice.She relatesher experience with internet-facilitated literary enthusiast groups, their growth in popularity and participants, and their hunger for books from mid-century and later which are now out of print, and for which the only ready source is the collections managed by librarians who are unaware that their discards are feeding a profitable micro-market. “Why should any private individual make money on our excess materials?” she wonders, and vexes that librarians are unaware of the value of the discards and donations that they sell, reporting a case where an acquaintance sold a 50-cent friends’ sale book for $650 via the internet.
Baxter is firmly on the side of librarians using auctions, but also taking greater responsibility for knowing the value of their collection, casting librarians as now having to be stewards of the investment value of our holdings, besides having yet another new technology tomaster.
Academic librarians Lisa Beinhoff and Steven Cox take a critical look at this technological and social trend, and caution that any naïve, noble intentions librarians may entertain regarding online auctions are dangerous and shortsighted.
Beinhoff describes her evidence that online sellers are busy ‘shopping’ library collections via online catalogs to target profitable books to ‘lose’ and resell, or to steal outright. Library book replacement fees are often absurdly small compared to the prices commanded in the burgeoning online market, because libraries don’t take into accountthe market value of a book when assessing replacement costs. She argues persuasively that libraries in public institutions areemployed as a source of supply by greedy sellers, who in turn exploit bibliophilic buyers by inflating prices whenever possible to create demand. This is not simply a case of clever people snapping up windfall sale books, she describes the systematic looting of libraries by criminals.
It is evident that the replacement fee loophole in library policy is being exploited, and that librarians are being tempted by the promise of easy money as well as patrons. Library literature reports only ‘major’ crimes, such as that of Norman Buckley, caught stealing over 400 rare books worth $470,000 from the Manchester, England Central Library in 2000 to sell on eBay; and Lori Burger of Lincoln Library in California, who in 2005 was charged with stealing 2,000 donated books, half of which she had already sold on eBay, making $10,000. Buckley was turned in by a bookseller, and his case resulted in adoption of RFID by his library. Burger was caught by an anonymous tip from a library employee. Surely these incidents are the tip of an iceberg – let us hope that librarians are looking out for it.
Beinhoff and Cox document a case where their library’s copy of a first edition On The Road would reasonably have a fair market value of $200-$500, but that a similar library copy had fetched $800 on eBay, and the (hyperinflated) value of the book was listed at over $30,000 by several sellers dealing through the Barnes and Noble used-book service. Beinhoff sadly concludes “To people selling used books on the Internet, my library’s worn copy had a commercial value. And because the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well, this work was destined to disappear from our library’s shelves.” She reports a steadily escalating valuation of common used books, and warns that even rural libraries are not safe from e-commerce-driven depredation. She recommends that to protect the collection, librarians must cultivate awareness of the online market for used books, remove valuable books to non-circulating collections, review fines and fees policies, and institute better inventory control and security.
It was gratifying to see exploration of deeper issues in these articles beyond the mechanics of setting up an eBay account and going into business, which was of course well-documented by the librarians who have embraced this course.
The real significance of online book auctions to libraries is that for the first time in history, the after-market book trade has been liberated from middleman brokers, and the entire world is now participating in what was a small and controlled market previous to the universal availability of the internet. This is not a hypothetical fret about ‘how e-books will impact use of print materials,’ it is happening in the moment, and directly affects the physical collection that we possess, and stands to impact future development. The true threat of online book auctions is that books and medianow have a fluctuating value in a constantly expanding global market that is hungry for these materials, particularlyfor collectibles, rarities and antiquities. Librarians are not used to thinking about the collection in these terms, leading us to devalue the worth of our collections, or worse, to ignore thisissue altogether.
Hill, Dale, “Selling Withdrawn and gift Books on eBAY: does It Make Sense?”, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Information Supply, 2003: v. 14 #2, p. 37-40.
Beinhoff, Lisa, A, and Stephen Cox, “How Online Auctions Threaten Library Collections,” American Libraries, March 2000: v. 31 #3, p. 53-55.
Baxter, Kathleen, “Your Discards May Be Somebody’s Treasure,” Library Journal, 4/01/2001, v. 125 #6, p. 62-63.