In Praise of BookBub

The great remainder table of online reading.

When I used to work for bookstores back in the 1990s, I really enjoyed opening the boxes of books destined for the remainder tables. These were books that didn’t sell (generally in hardback) that the stores had returned to the publishers, in exchange for refunds or credits to buy other books (that hopefully would sell).

The lesson that I didn’t learn from this is that the publishing industry has always been more than a little screwed up. If a grocery store chain buys too much broccoli, it doesn’t get to return the unsold heads to farmers for credit. But books aren’t so perishable. Unlike data stored in the cloud or on hard drives, books are downright durable and, even if just barely adequately cared for, will often outlast their owners.

It’s always a treat, but a little scary, to see books piled up on street corners, for passersby to take. So few other valuable things are given away so freely. If you walk by The Strand near Union Square, you will see shelves outside, piled with $1 or $2 books. Around the corner you’ll find the less famous, but probably more important Alabaster Book Shop, which also specializes in rare volumes. While browsing its $2 shelves you’ll sure peek into the window display where you’ll see rare and autographed editions by important writers. Maybe those $2 shelves will get you to go inside and splurge on a real collectible.

The remainder shelves at chain bookstores can be treasure lands. Sometimes, autographed books don’t get sold, they go back to the warehouse, get repackaged, repriced and set back to the stores. A book that went for $26 the first time around might go for less than $5 at this point, even with the author’s name signed to the title page in heavy black ink. Somehow, people knew the value in this, though. Remainders were often marked along the spine or pages, to show that they had been purchased in this diminished, bargain state. It’s a bit of an asterisk on your retail achievement. The mark of the literary skinflint.

For a bit, folks worried there would be no remainder tables because publishers had learned a new trick, which was to pull out the pages of an appropriately sized hardcover and then put those pages into a soft binding, for resale as a trade paperback, which would have a lower price than the hardcover but a higher price than the remainder and the prestige of being a book reborn, rather than re-shipped.

In the e-book world, there are no remainder tables, but there are flash sales, held by retailers and publishers. Cutting the price of an ebook to under $3 for a strictly limited time is a good way to get a few readers to take a chance on a new author or to create interest in the backlist of an established author.

BookBub, which keeps track of these deals and then lets you know about it through a free weekly email has been my online remainder table since it started up 12 years ago. The service has helped me fill in the gaps in my Kurt Vonnegut reading, taught me that Jose Saramago’s style is much more varied than you’d guess by just reading Blindness, exposed me to lesser know works by Anthony Burgess and allowed me to sample countless authors who I’d heard of but had not been moved to buy. I even picked up a novel by ee cummings, which is probably only something I would do in the quirkiest of second hand shops.

One of the advantages of BookBub is that its editorial team and algorithms resurface a lot of old books. Every reader’s joy and lament is that there is too much published that’s worth reading than there is time to read it all. Those news organizations that still cover and review books are always looking for what’s new. Their jobs are not backward looking. First run book stores are also, necessarily, always pushing what’s new. But good books are books that endure. A lot of people stopped reading The Great Gatsby as the Jazz Age gave way to the Great Depression and the Second World War. But it’s so good that it came back and next year we’ll celebrate its centennial. Bookbub might be bringing some gems back, too.

Whether ebooks or physical books are better isn’t much of a debate for me. I like them both and always have a selection of either to choose from. But now my e-stack is growing alongside the physical one. The remainder table strikes again.