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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I buy excellent books on Abe and Amazon for $1 as often as possible.
sometimes with free shipping.
I would not take money to have to wade through Goreon’s book again.
But the other commenters who point out that liquidating old books at $1 and less are on track: It is no big deal either way.
got a few (3 iirc) newer brad thor books for 14$ total and prime 2 day shipping on amazon.
there are really good deals there, people forget amazon started as book sales.
I might go ahead and buy a copy and use the pages for target practice at the gun club. I will then take the torn up pages home and free the trapped CO by burning them in my wood stove.
Keep in mind there may well be a tax incentive to get rid of old stock. Some fiefdoms with inventory tax started valuing unsold books at selling price rather than production cost or “remainder” selling price. So publishers were motivated to dump stock – unfortunate because some books will continue to sell but slowly.
There’s also the cost of warehousing space.
(Amusing side note to the bureaucracy called the publishing industry.
There’s a store in Canada selling remainders of books not well distributed in Canada. Appear to be a dealer for a US operation. Typical price in their window was several dollars per book.
Problems with distribution in Canada include IP rights, some things are licensed per country, some by region – notably movies. So someone in a country has to step up to a distribution deal. (Hence it is unlikely that the Atlas Shrugged movie trilogy will be shown in Canada, as it has not done well in the US. DVDs should be available however.)
That’s on top of the bookstore retailing stupidity that motivated the founding of Amazon company. Few got organized to order books for customers.
Another dumb move was only dealing with a limited number of book distributors, which limited selection.
Worse were the hypocrites of Bolen Books in Victoria BC, who tried to enlist government force against Amazon when it set up a warehousing and shipping deal in Canada yet couldn’t produce for customers. One person waited over a year for a book, finally someone close to her ordered it from Amazon who had it on her doorstep in ten days. And Bolen is not a full-line book store – you won’t find serious philosophy or science. (That probably reflects both the ideology of the owner and that it is a shopping mall store thus it is more lucrative to use its costly space for children’s books. The owner’s choice but immoral to bash others for serving different customers. In the Victoria BC area the class operation is Munro’s downtown, a well run store that hopefully will continue after Jim Munro retires.)
Bookstores continue to be odd people, different stores claim different maxims for the industry, I think they are like climate alarmists – saying whatever feels good to them.
Nevertheless, publishers must have badly over-estimated demand for algore’s blather. The price sounds low for remainders if it once was a strong seller.
Maybe he is coming out with a new edition. All he’d have to do is substitute “warming” with “cooling” and he might get another Nobel Lariat.
His Warholian fifteen minutes has finally passed.