Secondhand book sales online not only make millions but also offer demanding customers rare – or simply cheap – titles that might otherwise rot in landfill

Sometime in early 2013, in Dallas, Texas, a generous reader donated his impeccable first-edition copy of Philip Roth’s Our Gang to the local Goodwill store, its royal blue dust jacket gleaming as brilliantly as it did in 1971.

There it sat on a shelf, priced at $1, until a semi-trailer from Books Squared whisked it away among 3,000 other leftovers. At the Books Squared warehouse in south-west Dallas, Our Gang was checked and processed by receivers and a scrupulous quality-control team, who deemed the book “like new” before scanning it into their computer system to be sold online.

Dynamic pricing software cross-referenced every active listing of a used, like-new, hardcover copy of Our Gang across online marketplaces like Amazon and Abebooks, then matched the lowest price. Last March, four months after it was listed, I bought the book for a penny, and Books Squared shipped it to my apartment in Toronto. This handsome volume is sitting proudly on my desk right now.

Over the last year, to give you an idea of the riches for the taking, I’ve spent a penny each on Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson and Deception, Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark in hardcover, a first-edition copy of Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker, and one of Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things – among others.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Secondhand books: cheap bargains. Photograph: Alamy

Online, such literary treasures are in ample supply. But deals this good raise an obvious question. It clearly took a lot of time to usher Our Gang from the backrooms of Goodwill to Canada, where I live. So how does anyone make money selling a book for a cent?

Colin Stephens, founder and director of Sunrise Books in England, was thumbing through a charity shop’s bookshelf when the manager told him how much she’d come to hate used books. Every few days, she complained, she would have to load the trunk of her car with the shop’s excess donations and shuttle them to the landfill, in her own spare time and at her own expense.

Back then, Stephens happened to be out of work; he had long enjoyed buying and selling books on eBay, and suddenly saw an opportunity to turn his hobby into a full-time job. He told the manager that he would come by once a week to take the books and find them a new home. She was thrilled.

“The next day I got a call from one of her friends who manages another charity shop,” Stephens told me by phone, “and then another, and another.” He started selling these orphaned books online, out of his living room. Ten years later, Sunrise Books has four warehouses to its name, and is about to take over a fifth. “We have two vans out on the road every day that go around to charity shops on set runs,” he explains. They take in upwards of 20 tons of used books each week.

Charity shops are apparently inexhaustible wells, but sellers also turn to libraries, which sell or donate titles by the pallet; others head to elementary schools, where children’s reading material tends to be rebuilt semi-annually.

The only trouble is the low quality of that yield. Mike Ward, owner of Thrift Books – the largest of the used book sellers in the US and parent company to a number of subsidiaries, including Books Squared – likens the book collection process to “a very large salvage operation”. His network of warehouses is bringing in, on average, 15 semi-trailer trucks full of used books every day, but less than 20% of those books arrive in saleable condition.

The first thing Ward’s handlers must deal with is the garbage: “three-ring binders, Bibles, old Reader’s Digests, books that aren’t even books, books that are totally destroyed”.

From there the stock moves on to the receivers, who inspect each book’s condition and determine, by computer, its likely demand. “At that point they’re throwing away about 65% of what they touch,” Ward says – in part for the poor state many of them arrive in, of course, and in part as a consequence of supply and demand.

“There’s a limit to how many copies of Jurassic Park I can sell,” he explains. “If I already have a thousand in inventory and I think I’m only going to sell 500 in the next three months, I don’t want any more.”

In general, mercifully, Ward says Thrift Books “errs on the side of keeping more books than we need to”, and his software’s algorithms single out rare titles for protection even if market demand doesn’t warrant it. What they can’t sell, they recycle. That proves to be quite a few books: last year alone they recycled 130m pounds. What remains after a bookseller’s vetting process stocks their virtual storefronts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Online sellers can cater to people who have got a demanding taste. Photograph: Sean Smith

Who’s buying? Richard Davies, PR manager for the popular online marketplace Abebooks, describes the customer base as rather broad. “There are people who just want a cheap book,” he says, “and the used book market fulfills that really well.” Others, meanwhile, have more idiosyncratic requirements. “The book they need is not going to be in a Barnes & Noble.” So they turn to online retailers, where the “breadth of inventory really caters to people who have got a demanding taste”.

Root through enough charity shops and library discard piles, and you’re bound to come across a few valuables. In such cases the used book seller becomes a sort of antique dealer: with a few keystrokes they can put a true rarity online where those most interested can find it. Perhaps that’s why Mike Ward says Thrift Books is in the business of “matching people up with the treasures they want”.

Chuck Roberts, owner of Wonder Book in the US, opened his first bookstore in 1980. He remembers the golden age of the mid-1990s: “We were in the boom of the modern first editions and people were buying Stephen King first editions for $35 that now would sell for $3 or $4 at best.”

One of Roberts’s employees suggested that he get Wonder Book started on the internet, and, though the business hardly needed the additional income, he was persuaded to wade in. He picked “40 weird books” from the brick-and-mortar inventory and threw them up for sale online. The next morning he took a look at his page and was astonished to find he had an order: a book on the history of cattle in Frederick County, Maryland – sold to a farmer in England for $45. “We couldn’t sell that book in Frederick County for $45,” Roberts reflects, “but a guy in England who raises that kind of cattle wanted it.” The experience “was like the proverbial light going off in my head: we’re international now”.

Penny books, of course, don’t seem quite so lucrative as a $45 volume on cattle. “If you talked to me 10 years ago and said that you’d be selling books for a cent on the internet, I’d have said that’s impossible,” Roberts says. But there’s some money to be made for those who are, as he puts it, “extremely efficient”.

The price point is partly a result of the market’s downward pressure: at a certain level of supply and demand the race to the lowest price swiftly plummets to the bottom. What remains inflexible is the $3.99 fee Amazon charges the buyer for shipping. From that $4, Amazon takes what they call a “variable closing fee” of $1.35. They also charge the seller 15% of the item’s price – which in the case of a penny book is zero. That leaves $2.64 to cover postage, acquisition cost and overhead.

“All told,” Mike Ward concedes, “we only make a few cents on a penny book sale like that.” Now that hardly seems like much, true. “But keep in mind,” he adds, “that last year we sold 11.5m books.”

As a result, literature is better off. These used book sellers are providing an indispensable public service: they’re redirecting the world’s flow of used books from extinction to readers who can care for and appreciate them. “Before companies like ours,” Stephens tells me, “used books went to the landfill. The charities tossed them or sent them to pulping companies.”

Charity is a big part of the used book market. Martin Mullen, head of UK acquisitions at Better World Books, tells me that the public good is at the core of the company’s business: to date they have donated more than 50m books, raised millions of dollars for literacy initiatives, and reused or recycled more than 153m books – books that for the most part would be decomposing right now had they not saved them.

“I think the impact of people not having access to books or being able to enjoy books is huge,” Mullen says. That enthusiasm for reading is common among all of the used book sellers I spoke with. I don’t suppose it would be possible to devote so much effort to rescuing literature from oblivion without some affection for what’s being saved. “We want people to read,” Mike Ward says. “It doesn’t matter how you read or how you get your books. It just matters that you read.”

And at a penny a book, just about anyone can afford to.

