Book Or Library Sale Rules

Many Library and book sale organizers have in recent times been forced to implemented rules similar to the ones listed below. A small percentage of greedy and aggressive dealers have made some book sales very unpleasant for everyone. By adopting a few simple rules a lot of unpleasantness can be avoided. A typical list of library sale rules might read:

Places in line may not be held with bags, etc.

No saving places in line for other people or "line jumping."

All customers will work with one box or bag at a time.

No carrying books away from the tables/hoarding books to evaluate later.

Scanners and cell phones may be used to scan books only at the tables.

Boxes removed from display tables will be tallied as purchases.

No strollers, boxes or other containers large enough to block aisles.

Strollers cannot be accommodated in the sale rooms.

Books set aside must be purchased. No setting books aside/hoarding for later consideration.

People who engage in unacceptable forms of rude behavior like pushing, fighting, hoarding/scooping or bullying will not be checked out and will be asked to leave.

The book sale or library sale used to be a very civilized very laid-back and genteel affair. Traditionally dealers have paid a fee to attend a preview sale usually held a day or two before the main sale that is open to the general public. These dealers at the preview sale used to spend several hours browsing the titles in order to add new books to their inventory.

The Internet, online book selling and the handheld laser scanner has changed this for ever. Many dealers now line up hours before the sale, when the doors open they charge in and are using their cell phones or handheld scanners to scan the barcodes of as many books as they possibly can in the first 30 minutes of the sale. Frequently the book sale is very similar to a Black Friday stampede.

A few of the more undesirable dealers have developed a few tactics to give them the edge and increase their profits from the book sale. These include leaving a box or a bag with their name on many hours or even a day before the sale. They then show up 15 minutes before the doors open cutting into the front of the line to the place they saved with their box or bag. A few minutes later a half a dozen or of their friends, family or co-workers join them. The other people in line realize too late that these boxes or bags have been used to hold places in line for maybe a dozen or more people.

When the doors open a few of the more aggressive dealers will charge in and target what they hope are the more valuable books and media on sale. They grab anything that looks like it might be valuable and throw it into their box or bag, these are then hauled off into the corner and covered with a blanket, maybe with one of their cronies to guard them. They then run back to the tables and scoop up as many more valuable looking books as they possibly can. With all of their hoarded books in the corner these dealers then relax a little and start to scan the barcodes of the books remaining on the tables. When they have satisfied themselves that there are no more books of any real value left on the tables then, they will focus their attention on the books they hoarded earlier. They will usually sit down and scan them into to a buy pile and a reject pile, the reject pile is usually four or five times bigger than the keeper pile. Sometimes these unsavory book dealers will make a half-hearted attempt to put their reject books back when they got them from but usually not. They frequently just abandon them in the corner and leave it to the volunteers at the sale to put them back into the tables in the correct category.

Another common trick that these dealers employ is to make a selection of valuable books and hide them somewhere in the sale room, returning and retrieving them on the last day of the sale for the bag sale where the remnants of the sale are sold off for a couple of dollars a bag.

Another dealer ploy is to volunteer for the library in order to gain access to the valuable books before the sale. This usually doesn't last very long at all because it has the effect of essentially killing the book sale. When other dealers realize that the books have been cherry picked they are less likely to return for the next sale. Having book dealers volunteering for the library and buying the more valuable donated books for pennies on the dollar before the sale may even jeopardize the not for profit status of the friends of the library organization.

A lot of sales have set aside an area where customers can leave their books to be tallied and reserved while they continue to shop. This is a really good idea because some of the more unscrupulous dealers will steal other dealers selections and check them out themselves.

Some dealers will line up for many hours before a sale. Unfortunately for them most sales allow two or three people to enter through double doors at the same time. If there are 100 people in line for the sale and three people a second enter, then the last people in line will be going through the doors less than a minute after the first people went in. The dealer would have to be extremely good at what they do or have some very specific titles in mind for this one minute or even in many cases 30 seconds to make any difference whatsoever especially as they may have waited outside in line for several hours.

The unfortunate thing is that most dealers really don't want to hoard books and they really don't want to leave boxes and bags outside the sale to hold their place in line but to remain competitive they have to adopt some of these tactics where there are no rules in place to prevent others from doing so.

Fortunately for the sale organizers and the majority the other dealers these unscrupulous unsavory characters who have been drawn to book dealing on the Internet by the lure of the quick buck or easy money do not usually stick with it.

A good definition of most newcomer online book dealers is: Someone who was doing something else for a living last year and someone who will be doing something else for a living next year.