(no subject)
Feb. 1st, 2009 01:01 pmAs I write this, an incredibly small amount of snow is falling, so at the moment I'm not convinced that the second Ice Age predicted by the BBC is upon us...
In other news, as anyone who's ever read this LJ will probably have guessed, I am a terrible (wonderful?) bookworm and can't resist wandering into charity shops to eye up their secondhand books. In particular, I am cursed (blessed?) by working within 2 minutes' walk of two fine examples of the genre, one of which insists on running a 3-paperbacks-for-£1 deal that always seems to see me leaving the shop with at least that number. The other is resolutely selling paperbacks for 50p a time, though they did have an utterly evil 5-paperbacks-for-£1 thing going on just after Christmas.
They have spoiled me, it seems. Many other charity shops seem determined to sell their tattiest copy of Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code (also the most common books on ReadItSwapIt, which should come as no surprise to anyone...) for £1, if not £1.50, and there's even one shop I went into recently that I can only assume has a policy of pricing its paperbacks by weight.
I wonder if this defeats the intention, though - surely it's better to sell 3 paperbacks for £1 and for the charity in question to actually have that £1 to spend than have those three books sit on the shelf and not have the £3-£4.50 that you're asking for them? After all, the books are only worth something if people buy them...
In other news, as anyone who's ever read this LJ will probably have guessed, I am a terrible (wonderful?) bookworm and can't resist wandering into charity shops to eye up their secondhand books. In particular, I am cursed (blessed?) by working within 2 minutes' walk of two fine examples of the genre, one of which insists on running a 3-paperbacks-for-£1 deal that always seems to see me leaving the shop with at least that number. The other is resolutely selling paperbacks for 50p a time, though they did have an utterly evil 5-paperbacks-for-£1 thing going on just after Christmas.
They have spoiled me, it seems. Many other charity shops seem determined to sell their tattiest copy of Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code (also the most common books on ReadItSwapIt, which should come as no surprise to anyone...) for £1, if not £1.50, and there's even one shop I went into recently that I can only assume has a policy of pricing its paperbacks by weight.
I wonder if this defeats the intention, though - surely it's better to sell 3 paperbacks for £1 and for the charity in question to actually have that £1 to spend than have those three books sit on the shelf and not have the £3-£4.50 that you're asking for them? After all, the books are only worth something if people buy them...