by trod1234 | 2025-04-10 06:13:30+00:00
The article primarily draws on the fact that the number of bookshops hasn't driven other second-hand bookshops out of business because the number of bookshops has grown over the measured number of years.

The reasoning it follows and suggested is quite dubious.

A bookshop is a business. Any business naturally has a loss function in the form of constraints, after which point it necessarily must go out of business and close. That loss function also determines how many people can be served by that bookstore insofar as the revenue earned goes to capital reserves and operations.

The second-hand bookstores have remained almost constant over decades, while population growth and the number of people being served has grown dramatically.

The charity bookshops involved have special tax status, they receive free stock, they get to choose which stock they receive goes to the paper mill or gets resold, and they can continue as long as their charity can continue.

While they must keep accounting records, those records need not be public, and may involve donations that may further subsidize destructive behaviors without the public's knowledge. They need not make a profit, whereas all other non-charity bookstores must make sufficient profit.

No business that has natural constraints can compete with an unconstrained entity in the same market. The money printer without constraint will always win, suborn, and drive out other businesses that do not have the same constraints.

It is just a matter of time and economic circumstance, and by the time anyone notices its too late.

There is also the possibility that many of the secondhand shops may also be propped up through loans, despite the ever tightening dynamic of ponzi that must be paid back (as it works for all debt in general).

There is great harm that state propped apparatus can do to business and the market in general, as well as to society. Rather than being open about it, these things have been happening in the shadows and that's something that needs to be revisited. If there is not a comparable loss constraint, the accounting records should be public to safeguard cultural history, and hold to account malefactors.

When the state wants objectionable material out of the general population's hands it just silently removes it from a pipeline they created, having learned from history, more specifically Hitler that burning books in public isn't a good thing.

Goodwill follows this practice of removing objectionable material from its pipeline in the US, and library budgets in many places are dictated by how often the book is circulated. Low circulated classics that are objectionable according to some undisclosed person, may just disappear once the library donates the low circulation books to the charity, that then removes that content without fanfare before it ever hits a shelf.

Ever wonder why many books from the 80s or earlier are often quite uncommon? Yes they are old, but the circulation was massive for a lot of these, and what's available now doesn't account for the natural difference of time, especially considering many of the books received from libraries were rebound to library bindings.

Food for thought.