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Worlds Without End Blog

Used Book Sellers – Please Put Your Barcodes on the Back Cover Posted at 12:51 PM by James Wallace Harris

jwharris28

I buy lots of used books from ABEbooks.com and Amazon.com. And it appears that selling used books online is big business. And when businesses get big, they automate. Most of the used books I buy online now come with barcode stickers. I’m sure such automation is needed to keep prices down, and handling to a minimum. What I hate, though, is when they put the barcode sticker on the front of the book, or the spine.

Barcodes on book spines

Don’t they know that some of us are book collectors? Don’t they know that used book buyers love the cover art? I sometimes decide on buying the paperback or hardback by their cover art. And the best thing about science fiction paperback books from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s are their covers. I sometimes pass on a cheap ebook just to get an old paperback with a great cover.

It drives me nuts to get a book with a beautiful cover and a damn barcode sticker is right in the middle of the art.

Most of these barcode stickers aren’t easy to remove, or damage the cover when removing. It would be different if they peeled off easily leaving no mark. But that’s not the case.

And I can understand the urge to put the barcode on the spine of the book, because that makes shelving and finding books easier. But if the sticker doesn’t peel off, I have to look at them on my book shelves, and they’re ugly.

If you have to put a barcode sticker on a book, use the back cover. And don’t cover up the book’s original barcode. Goodreads users, as well as many other book database programs, use the ISBN barcode to scan in with a smartphone. When that barcode is covered, I have to type it in by hand.

I understand booksellers make their money by selling in volume. I don’t buy $300 first editions. When I buy from ABEbooks, which orders their default searches by lowest total cost, I’m getting an out-of-print book shipped to me from across the country for just a few dollars. So I can’t expect much. But the condition of the book, and its cover is important to me.

Some of these books are fifty years old, and their cover art takes me back to my childhood. They are a dwindling resource, and damaging them reduces their collector value.

 

2 Comments

Dave Post   |   31 Oct 2016 @ 13:55

I feel your pain. Those old-school stickers that are designed to tear into little bitty pieces are the freakin’ bane of my book buying existence. I frequent Half Price Books and though they’ve switched to a kinder, gentler sticker glue they still have tons with the old crap price tags. They seem to be on all the clearance hardcovers that I want and it’s a huge pain to get them off without peeling up the cover art.

Sable Aradia   |   03 Nov 2016 @ 03:40

GRRRRR! I know, right? ARGH, I hate that!

Dave, the little stickers from Half Price Books . . . okay, so it’s not perfect but I work at a used bookstore and we get that stuff too. How we deal with it is to take a damp cloth and wipe those ones off through dampness and friction. Failing that, try a little Windex on a cloth; the ammonia seems to help. Sometimes doing that too hard or with really sticky glue leads to small white tears in the cover, but I figure that’s better than big white tears in the cover, right?

That’s no help for those accursed bar codes though. Yeah, I sure wish these big used book sellers would get a clue!

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