Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth used to be one of the hottest items (no pun intended…umm, well maybe) but now, not so much. While it is still being sold on Amazon.com for as much as ten dollars, it seems there is now a burgeoning discount market for AIT.
Have a look at this seen at a major bookseller’s discount table (h/t to Ward D. Lyon on Twitter)
And, it gets worse, some Amazon used book sellers are unloading it for a penny!
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An electrical utility plant running on unsold copies of this book would be unsustainable.
Even if it was subsidized with our taxes.
Think about the carbon sequestration requirements.
like old phone books
Catlitter!
and the best use for it.
I’m a retired book publisher, and there’s no mystery here: When you see a book selling for $5 or less, what you’re most likely seeing are remaindered copies. When a book reaches what the publisher considers “end of life,” remaining inventory is written off and sold for almost nothing to remainder dealers, many of whom are now online. (They used to be tent sellers at flea markets, strip mall used bookstores, and so on.) “Penny sellers” are basically giving the book away and padding the shipping cost a little, which is how they make their money. Remaindered books are marked as such with a black felt marker swipe across the page edge. After remaining inventory is gone, a book is typically declared “out of print.” It could be heading to another edition, typically from hardback to paperback. Most of the time, the book is just dead, and rights revert to the author, who is not paid for whatever money is received from remainder houses.
Thanks for explaining that
Once, in the future, when most copies gone missing, Al Gore’s book might reach high price in auction for Dreams instead of solid sound science
Obviously been deemed an ‘Inconvenient Book’ which is clogging up valuable floorspace.
Actually, this is very serious stuff. The price is the real revision to the book indicated in the blue masthead wherein it says, ‘Adapted for a NEW GENERATION.’ That adaptation is for the new generation of jobless, penniless, student loan debt ridden, recent college graduates.
Works for me. Is there a quantity discount ? Christmas is coming soon.
Al Gore is the solution to warming. Has anyone received any grant money to study the Gore effect? This guy’s life’s work should be to fly into localized hot spots, deliver a speech thereby bringing the temp down to slightly below normal.
Anthony:
That wasn’t a pun, d@mmit.
At a penny it might be worthwhile as kindling.
For a penny, it’s worth buying if only to punch a hole through one corner and hang it up in the privy on a length of string.
I don’t want it even if it is free.
Pelletize the remaining inventory and sell it to Britain for fuel. No point in cutting trees twice for the same stupidity. Surprised Al hasn’t thought of that already.
Might make decent boiler fuel at $0.01 each. A way to recycle the carbon….lol.
Still, its lies and propaganda are now being disseminated on the cheap!
$0.01 is a lot to pay for a load of codswallop.
back when USPS had media mail rates, you could mail that book for 2.25. amazon would get their cut, which at one penny is nothing. amazon would give you the $3.99 shipping. so, with media mail and a decent cut for amazon, you could make 1.75 selling a book for a penny. if you got a trunkload of books for a quarter each, you can make money if you are efficient.
sadly, USPS has modified the ol’ ‘media mail’ class. probably too many ppl were mis-using it. but you can still make money selling a book for a penny.
Ah, yes. “On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
One of the most important science books ever. It allows us to take our prejudices against the lower classes and justify policies, such as eugenics and welfare policies, and claim that we are not being classist, but just being “scientifick-y.”
Now, let’s get on with the sterilization of those undesirables! Three generations of imbeciles is enough!
People who stretch words into meanings that Darwin never intended do him an injustice. Favoured in this sense does not mean favored by human society or human individuals, but by natural selection. The word race in this context does not mean racial distinctions within homo sapiens, but means species of organisms. Don’t blame Darwin’s correct observations of nature and reality for the bigotry of human beings.
Acceptable to a point; have you read “The Descent of Man?” Get 100 pages into it and you’re ready to rip the thing up.
Darwin’s nephew, at the least thought his uncle was all for eugenics. Here is a excerpt that is chilling in its name dropping significance.
http://books.google.com/books?id=4T4hAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=darwin%27s+nephew+eugenics&source=bl&ots=hPR1iNPKFo&sig=4zWp7fmbQGSJaX8–1POr_eVZh0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=WEw3VMqxA9WkyAT00oHYDA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=darwin%27s%20nephew%20eugenics&f=false
And eugenics was the sciencey fad embraced by the educated self-declared elites and government officials of the day. Sort of like a certain other sciencey fad that one gets in trouble for resisting.
Don’t get upset with me. Get upset with his excitable cousin, Galton.
Galton coined the term “eugenics.”
For hundreds of years, at least since the beginning of the Poor Laws, the educated elite in Britain had been trying to understand why some people don’t pull their own weight in society.
Micky, if you or anyone else goes and reads about the initiation and subsequent history of the Poor Laws, poor houses, and alms houses in Britain, you will see the class issues very clearly.
The IDEA that the differences in the classes – the stable classes and the ne’er-do-well drifter irresponsible-breeder classes – had a rational, scientific basis was already present, leadingly in Haeckel’s scientifick-y beliefs about the differences between races…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel
Darwin simply gave Galton, Haeckel, and other elitist intellectuals a convincing mechanistic theory of the way that some “races” came to be superior or inferior to others.
This is not stretching words, but illuminating truth. We carry these ideas to the present day. Involuntary sterilization of inferiors was normal up through the 1970s. Well, at least here in the United States. I don’t know what country you are in, Micky.
Anyone can ignore this info or begin reading. I myself simply do not trust educated elitist totalitarians very much anymore. I have seen enough.
I’m opposed to book burning on general principles, but given the continued downward slide in the price, and the remarkable lack of warmth these past few winters, this is looking like a cost-effective alternative to firewood.
It’s not at all uncommon for books, CDs, and DVDs that sold large numbers of copies to be sold on Amazon for one cent. I’ve bought many of them. The sellers make their money on the difference between the amount charged for postage ($3.99) and what it cost to actually mail most of these items.
The reviews of the book (28 very positive, 22 very negative) and its Amazon Best Sellers rank of #115,777 are more revealing.
EDIT: It’s not at all uncommon for used copies of books, CDs, and DVDs that sold large numbers of copies to be sold on Amazon for one cent.
$10.12 with free 2 day shipping (prime membership) is cheapest I found (with shipping added in) on Amazon.
DOH !!
found a paperback for 8.78 with the 2 day shipping (prime) there.
http://tinyurl.com/klckvc6
Still not going to buy it.
I avoid this tripe like I avoid Ebola.
While I know the derision of Al’s book is justified, it is a fact this book and the movie influenced a lot of people and is worthy of note. I have reluctantly put it in my library where it joined my first edition of Nansen’s Furthest North, in two volumes, and my 6th edition of Darwin’s Origin. I am not saying it is on the same level but if you are rummaging through the scraps of history trying to figure out why the hell people did what they did, something like Al’s opus might be useful.
I am certain when the global warming tide starts to go out, the story will sink quickly into the sand. The book will become inconvenient evidence of how really stupid we can collectively become.
I thought we fowned on book buurning here. This one is suitable to repair a wobbly table. yes. But Burn it NO.
I thought we frowned on book burning here.
@RobRoy, hence the term Thought Experiment. And in reality, getting enough for a warm fire would be hard. It is just fun to fantasize.