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Massive Book-Burning Project Now Operating at Thousands of US Universities & Libraries — NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)
“Better World Books” sounds like it must be doing a good job. Actually, Better World Books found a way to profit from the existence of lots of books. But society pays a heavy toll for “Better World’s” profit. BWB collects books from thousands of locations, maily universities and libraries. (I haven’t learned yet if they’re getting the books from UMass or not, because the bin there is marked “BooksForTheWorld.com,” which is not a real in-use web address, though it is available.)
I watched BWB’s founder Xavier Helgesen interviewed on Bloomberg’s Venture. A link is below, but I’ll give you the highlights/lowlights: The company is run by at least one cool/hip-seeming person. The company spends some profits on good causes. The company collects lots of books, lets people search them out online. The company destroys about half the books it collects, because they don’t sell quickly or efficiently.
I think this is an emergency. These books being destroyed are important to our collective knowledge and heritage. Let me give you just one example: The National Encyclopedia from the years 1929-1936. Ten huge volumes, profusely illustrated in black-and-white photos and prints. Ten more volumes of annual yearbooks. If BWBs gets ahold of these, they’re headed for the incinerator; ah, green energy! Odds are, no one will ever buy them. Yet they are invaluable.
You probably have an almanac or encyclopedia, or some list of US Presidents. If you look up Warren G. Harding, the info there probably tells you that he died in office. That’s a lie of omission, because, by saying he “died in office,” the reference book insinuates that the death was not suspicious. However, if you look in the National Encyclopedia from the years I cited, you’ll learn that around the time his Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted a bribe from Sinclair Oil, he suddenly died under “very suspicious circumstances,” which have not gotten less suspicious in these 90 years, though the publishing establishment for the most part ignores them.
Here in Amherst, we have a Free Store called the “Survival Center,” where people can get free books or other free goods that someone has donated. The Town Dump also runs something of a Free Store, where donors stock their books on shelves, and other townsfolk come along and take them. Here, the League of Women Voters has a huge cheap old book sale. Good Will and the Salvation Army also hold such giant sales, which serve to recycle books.
Book burning should never be tolerated in a free society, even if someone who looks like a hippie can make money off of it. Book destruction by BetterWorldBooks and similar schemes must be stopped. Find out what your local universities, colleges, bookstores, book sales and comic stores do with their used books. Make sure they are not sending them to be destroyed – not half of them, not any of them!
http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2009/06/17/did-you-catch-us-on-bloomberg-tv/
6 Comments
Hi NormanB, I know the book “house” at the recycling center, AKA dump, in Amherst, and the Survival Center there. Great example about the suspicious death of Warren G. Harding: I had not known. The promised link, however, was not there. Help?
http://blog.betterworldbooks.com/2009/06/17/did-you-catch-us-on-bloomberg-tv/
1) Interesting post Norman, but I’d like more information. It seems the universities may be as much the culprits as Helgesen.
2) Encyclopedias should basically never be destroyed. If you are in the market for an Encyclopedia Britannica, you are best off getting a hundred year old set (I believe the 1909 edition). After that the University of Chicago took over and made it politically correct and a whole lot less interesting. If one wants a sense of history instead of just what some fuckfaceignoramous in the msm or mspublishing thinks, one should try actually reading an OLD book. Frankly, the ignorance of history even in progressive circles is absolutely totally staggering. There is very little history in your typical Barnes and Nobles or Borders. Anybody who goes about reading history by browsing titles in one of those intellectual cesspools will likely remain ignorant forever. Interesting history is almost often not politically correct, while the big bookstores ALWAYS are. Bill Maher is not politcally correct. And, not surprising, he is not interesting.
3) Reasonably old books probably should never be destroyed. I have a decent collection and once I got rid of a handful of books including one on advertising of all things. Five years later, I desperately needed THAT book!
4) People should face up to all the virtual book burning that goes on when the internet gets scrubbed. (Does anybody know an archiving way around this scrubbing? Is there an easy accurate way of searching the internet of the past?)
A most excellent (and, as is typical of you, Norman, a thought-provoking) post.
Recommended.
“The True University is a Collection of Books”
(Chiseled in stone above the main entrance to Pattee Library, at Penn State University.)
Book-burning is a singular and striking example of “expediency”, let us hope it does not come to be seen as “pragmatic” or “political”, for then it will be commonplace and unremarked … as well as unenlightened and most unwise.
DW
No book should be burned or thrown away until it is falling apart. There are libraries that need books, underfunded schools need books and I’m sure that many countries need books. What a terrible waste.
We’d like to address the claim in your piece that Better World Books incinerates books. We take this very seriously, as neither we nor our recycler make use of an incinerator, and we would never burn a book.
In fact, our whole reason for existing is to keep books from getting trashed. We love books and we are fanatic about caring for the environment.
Every day, about 80,000 discarded books — books that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill somewhere — arrive at our warehouse in Mishawaka, Indiana. We will either resell them to happy new homes via BetterWorldBooks.com (raising funds for literacy programs in the process), donate them directly to one of our non-profit literacy partners in the US and abroad, or recycle them. For those rare books you mentioned, we have a specific collection of rare, antique and collectible books.
Quite simply, if they didn’t come to us, many of these books would go straight to landfill or a recycler without ever finding a chance to be lovingly re-used.
We ensure that used books have the longest possible active lifespan. In fact, since we started the company, we’ve rescued over 34 million books from landfills!
We welcome you to give us a call if you’ve got more questions — and the next time you’re in Mishawaka, please swing by! We’d love to give you the full tour.
-David Murphy
CEO, Better World Books