Oo-Oo That Smell (of Used Books)

Have you ever ordered a book from an independent bookstore or individual online only to find that it reeks of smoke when it arrives? What about those great finds at garage sales or thrift stores that smell musty?

We have your answer.

In our bookstore we have used and new books. This means that we get a great deal of used books in various conditions and states.

Especially smelly ones.

When we first opened our store, we went through several trial and error processes (on our own and on the suggestion of others) to rid our used books of smells. Many of them smelled like smoke. (Are you a bookseller that smokes? You've been forewarned. You can't smell it on the books, but we can!) Some smelled musty (you know, grandma had a gazillion books in her attic and now we want you to have them). Some smelled like body odor.

Seriously.

So we had a dilemma. We pride ourselves on the quality of our used books, so we didn't want to sell a book that smelled like it had spent last night at the local pub or that Uncle Frank didn't know that there were combinations of deodorant AND antiperspirant.

So what to do?


Things that didn't work for us:

1. Letting the book "air out".
This included removing the jacket from hardcovers, opening the books, and letting clean air get to them. Doesn't work. Don't even try.


2. Use baking soda.

The recommendation was to place the book in an enclosed area/dish/pan/bag and pour baking soda around it. It does get rid of the smell. Sound messy? It was. And? There's something to be said for your customers (or your mother-in-law) wondering what that "white substance" is in/on your books. We tried this for several months before coming up with the ONE THING that consistently worked for us:


FABRIC SOFTENER SHEETS FOR YOUR DRYER


We buy the cheapest brand we can find (hey, we're on a budget here) and insert them inside the book, place it in a Ziploc bag with a couple of other sheets and VOILA! Smell is gone. Have extra-super-smelly books? Add a couple of more sheets throughout the book and inside the bag and let it sit a little longer. Change out the sheets, let is sit for another couple of days.


Now you know our secret (shhhh...don't tell anyone). What's your secret for getting those smells out of your books?

New Twist on #amazonfail: Indie Bookstores Take a Hit

Censorship. It's an ugly enough word to make anyone shudder, especially in relation to banning books (at least for us).

If you haven't yet heard of the #amazonfail movement you're either
1) in a chocolate-bunny-induced coma, or
2) don't own a computer.

Either one of those and you probably won't care about this post. However, there are many people that are up in arms about (what seems) Amazon's censorship on some books the company deems questionable.

To give some background, a few days ago authors and readers started to notice that some of their favorite books were no longer showing up on Amazon searches. In brief, the books had been deranked by Amazon (and books with no rankings don't show up on Amazon). The reason? Amazon categorized them to have "adult content" (a definition of which no one seems to be able to extract from Amazon). Some of the books had gay and lesbian content. Some were romance novels. Some were young adult books. The LA Times did a great article on this. Head on over for the full details.

Anyway, the word spread quickly online via Twitter and the #amazonfail movement was created. Now we're hearing a lot of grumblings about people boycotting Amazon.

The unlucky victims in this?
Independent bookstores who use Amazon as their vehicle to sell books - either via an Amazon webstore or individual listings on Amazon.

Why do we care?
We're one of them. Our website is run through Amazon as a Webstore and it's our main venue for selling books.

After initially building a site and then realizing that it was going to take time-consuming conversions to work with our POS software, we had to make a switch to an Amazon site. And here we are, an Amazon seller.

And now we're stuck in the crossfire.

You wouldn't know that our site is an Amazon store until you get to checkout, where you're asked to login to your Amazon account. Now we're being told that people aren't going to buy from Amazon, which ultimately means they aren't going to buy from us.

We understand how upset you are. We disagree with censorship, too. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the content of these books. We aren't asking you to discard your views and disregard what Amazon is doing. What we do ask is that you reconsider your boycott when shopping with independent bookstores, like us, who run their site through Amazon out of budgetary necessity.

There are other ways to fight this (just Google #amazonfail and you'll find pages of ways or visit this blog - Warning: the blog contains explicit language). And just maybe these other ways won't sacrifice the unassuming independent bookstores for a decision over which they had no control.