Ehh...I read his book on Pyongyang and mostly hated it. What the guy above says is correct, though. Because there's NOTHING out there on North Korea, it becomes interesting by default. But the book is no damn good, and Delisle seems like kind of a prick.

When I was mugged in 2000, a bunch of guys jumped me from behind and kicked the shit out of me. Now I have to feel guilty I didn't ask them to dinner? Screw this guy.

Also, I don't know what it's like in other cities more car-oriented, but when people steal piles of books, it's not to sell to other stores. I've been a book retailer for thirteen years and I've never once heard of anyone trying to get cash for, say, ten copies of Valis. (Stolen TEXTBOOKS is another racket entirely; we have to deal with that pretty frequently.)

Those thieves are, or work for, a street-retailer subculture. Pretty much any time you buy a book off a table in NYC, and it isn't obviously a used book (i.e. new-looking books sold at half the cover price), you're buying stolen books.

Also I should add to that hip-neighborhood shortlist of superthefted books: Jack Kerouac.

It depends a lot on the location of the store. When I worked in bookstores in the East Village, yeah, that list is 100% DEAD ON. That is exactly all the stuff that would get boosted without fail, and we kept it in a special section where we could keep our eyes on it.

But the East Village (young, hip, affluent, white) is a different demographic from, say, Flatbush, Brooklyn (broader age range, lower- or middle-class, black, with a side order of CUNY student), where I work now. The Top 5 hit parade of theftable items would look more like this:

1. Zane
2. Robert Greene
3. T.D. Jakes
4. Joel Osteen
5. any Oprah book

Stockhausen was alive?

@oddible

"The Coop has an inside line on required texts. It's the only place students can get full information on the books they need to buy."

Uh, how about the PROFESSOR who ordered the books from the store in the first place? If the responsibility for a student's comparison shopping lies anywhere, it must be there.

@noen

Well, on the list of people making a buck from the transaction, don't forget the publishers who by far get the largest cut and hold the greatest responsibility for textbook pricing in the United States. Bookstore margins are actually pretty slim, usually around twenty percent (ours are, at least; the B&N on campus here has a slightly higher markup), i.e. when you're picking up that $190 calculus textbook, your bookstore's probably making about $38 on the deal.

Publishers charge what they feel the market can bear, which is why those companies sell identical (not similar, but identical) texts for about half the price outside the United States.

@bcrowell:

Don't be so sure. In our store, we have a steady stream of customers all through the semester, up to and including the day of the final for the course.

One way bookstores and publishers (since the people who make the book don't make any money if you buy a used copy off eBay) have been circumventing this is with custom texts, which are standard textbooks that are abridged or rewritten in some way (often by the professor teaching the course) specific to that particular course in that particular semester. That way, it doesn't matter a good goddamn if you have the ISBN or pricing information, there isn't an alternative outlet for the books. They were specially printed and the only copies in existence are in your school bookstore.

I run an independent college bookstore in New York in direct competition with a Barnes & Noble (which has the advantage of being on campus). We sometimes get students copying down ISBNs, which, eh, sucks, but whatever. We're cheaper than B&N on most everything, so I don't worry about their price competition, but there's no way we can compete with the online secondary market, which is really what the copying of ISBNs is for, since the textbook biz has a (probably intentional) mystifying array of versions and editions and varieties only distinguishable by ISBNs.

One thing I won't do, however, is give students ISBNs over the phone, which most students get pissy about. Your professor almost certainly has contact info listed on their syllabus. Use it. It's not my responsibility to insure you get the correct book or edition when you patronize our competitors.