One of the pleasures I have when I go to see my parents in Fuengirola is to accompany my father to discover second-hand books, at a flea market. Like his twin sister, my almost ninety-year-old father continues to read a book a day, and has found in the rake a bottomless pit for his need to travel through letters to feed his hungry brain. There are a couple of stalls that have a careful selection of themes, on the other hand, in other stalls you find a different theme every week depending on the library that has been put within reach when the heirs sell the house. Books that we buy at one euro each copy, because less seems indecent to us.
In my parents’ house there have always been books on the shelves and as my father’s began to populate all kinds of tables, my mother invited him to do Cross Book with some books, so my father leaves books on the street in his different rides. For my part, it is difficult for me to throw away books, and in fact, I not only keep my collection of the magazines Motociclismo, La moto, Scootermania, Solomoto, SM30, but also that of a friend who 15 years ago, when his wife married The woman told him that those boxes of motorcycle magazines did not fit into his tiny house, so I have them in storage until their owner is allowed to enjoy that almanac of knowledge again. So, I try to convince my mother that just like the books she has on her shelf, I’m interested in keeping my father’s even though I still can’t read French.
Also last week James Rodriguez de Santiago launched this question on twitter “A friend asks me where she can donate books (novels, mainly) now that she is moving to another city and doesn’t want to take them with her. any ideas?”
As the Twitter agora that Jaime treasures is rich, immediately there were interesting responses referring to municipal clean points that have space for exchange, as apparently the one in Pozuelo; others as they have done in the doorway of their house, putting some books in a box; others about NGOs that collect books to resell them and obtain funds for projects such as AIDA, Solidarity Book, Better books. Another very interesting project are to the forgotten donation of books for women in prison, and several tweeters mentioned Wind turbine in which you decide what you pay for the books!
This prompted me to ask Alvaro Nephew, publisher of Blue Editions and the magazine Visual, why it is so complicated to donate books or sell them second hand. On the one hand, he told me that when he tried to donate to his town’s library the 7,000 books they had received for a decade in their annual Visual Awards contest, the councilor for culture told him that he had to reject it, not for lack of space, but because they had to buy shelves.
On the other hand, Álvaro explained to me why publishers do not donate books that they do not sell, explaining that around the year 2000 a movement was created to donate books to Latin America, but soon the NGOs realized how expensive it was to transport them there, so they began to sell them second-hand, with which they found themselves with books at a very low price that were still on the best-seller lists, with which that donation to another continent became a boomerang that made it compete at a price much lower in the Cuesta de Moyano in Madrid or in San Antonio in Barcelona. Also, public libraries only accept bestsellers less than two years old.
The good thing about Alvaro is that he always explains the cause of the problems, and it is the Spanish book culture, created on the basis of Franco’s law of the fixed-price book, which forces booksellers to make a 5% discount at most and at the fair 10%. On the other hand, in London you find new books on sale as is done here with clothes without going any further. But here it is forbidden. Worth this brief reflection of Alvaro about the book market.
In fact, when Álvaro helped me self-publish my book, he told me that if a bookseller asked for my book, he had to give him a 25% discount so that he would have a commercial margin, by law! When the majority of consumer goods that we have are not subject to such limitations.
Curious that I tell you how in the “bookstore for the dead” business you pay by the linear meter, which ends up costing 0.15 cents each copy, and that in second-hand books you buy by weight at 3 euros…
For this reason, from here I ask that the price of the new book be liberalized, so that you can not only buy a book at RRP, and then have to wait years for it to be discontinued to find it almost by chance at a very low price and in questionable condition. Or having located a second-hand bookstore where journalists and bloggers “give away” the copies that publishers give them for free.
With a liberalization of prices and discounts, thousands of temples of culture could be helped, such as bookstores and publishers that fight with one arm tied, because fame is granted to them, while distribution cards the wool, as Amazon demonstrated, by be the book market, the first to burst.
PS: “they tell us that it rains” is a concept created by Alvaro Sobrino.
–
