My experience has been that the second-hand bookshops have had thin times but nonetheless survive because of the internet. They tend to have a better selection compared to charity shops, i.e. not just cast-offs of holiday novels and celeb bios. Shout out to https://www.tillsbookshop.co.uk/ and https://www.armchairbooks.co.uk/
There has also been a growth in first-hand bookshops, especially specialists/curators (e.g. only selling sci-fi, only selling books by women, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the Waterstones and Blackwells of this world.
I've noticed a few book stores which intermingle new and used stock and they're great. (it's obvious when something isn't new stock but it's all pretty good condition regardless)
> But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns.
There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.
Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.
Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.
> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.
Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
Anecdotal but I haven't seen a 2nd-hand bookshop in years however those little "tiny libraries" where people just donate their books are in abundance. What I've seen other used-item shops are doing these days is checking online what things are worth and selling them for very slightly less and it seems like this has to be a death-knell for secondhand stores in general.
And I know they have to do this, everything donated has to be checked to ensure safety and cleanliness, it costs them money to keep the shop open and staffed. But if you can't actually save money by buying secondhand goods there then why would anyone shop there?! It's a 10 - 20 percent discount on goods that may be years old when Amazon rotates these discounts through new goods 24/7.
We have two second hand bookstores in my area. One of them has changed hands a couple of times over the years, so I don't think they make a ton of money, although they are in a large, albeit older, retail space so they must do ok. The other keeps expanding in adjacent spaces, but seems to make a lot of their money selling book adjacent stuff (socks, bookmarks, pins, candles) instead of actual books. In fact the owner regularly stocks several of those free libraries around town and always has free books outside of her store.
One benefit could be curation and discovery. Sometimes a bookstore's displays will show me a book that I might have not otherwise thought to read, selected by their readers, and I'm happy to pay a modest premium for that service.
For years I joked that it was a law that every Goodwill store had to have a copy of a Twilight or Hunger Games book on the shelves at all times. Every time I go to one I check and nearly every time they still do all these years later.
There's a neighborhood in Tokyo called Jinbōchō, which built an entire town out of different specialist second-hand book shops.
If you ever need a specific book on a specific thing, you bet you can find it there.
It's pretty sweet.
There's a subtext to this post that may not be obvious to non British people: UK High Streets (Main Streets) have in the last 20 years experienced an incredible explosion of charity shops (thrift stores) including many locations specific to books.
Quite why this has occurred is a subject of occasional argument, but I've never heard a definitive theory on it, and it partly overlaps with the general decline motivated by ecommerce. They do compete on some level with existing businesses, as debated here, but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties.
For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.
Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.
As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
I think a lot of people get the causal relationship the wrong way around when it comes to charity shops and the decline of the high street. It's not (IMO) that charity shops move into otherwise thriving areas and lead to a decline in local business by competing, but rather that they move into spaces that would otherwise lie empty, and therefore are more likely to be found on high streets that were already dying. Where I live we have a few charity shops but it's mainly chicken shops, vape shops and the occasional barber that are cannibalising the local high street.
> Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
Not sure about UK, but in the USA, people have discovered that there's profit in mining thrift stores for quality products and reselling them. Usually online, but also in antique malls*. There are a quite a few apps that make it easy to look up something by picture and see what it's worth.
* not sure what Brits would call this - it's like brick and mortar ebay. Merchants rent out cubicles that they fill with random stuff, and customers check out at a common till when they are done.
It’s not that complicated. Business rates (commercial property tax) are very high for shops in the UK, and Charity shops are exempt. The rates really are high — about 50% on top of the rent. Plus a lot of the staff work for free. Their cost base is just vastly lower.
It can of course vary considerably by store, and I’ll happily spend time in both but, generally:
Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable.
Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of books people don’t want), so they tend to have a large collection of random books of not as high quality. They’re run by volunteers - which generally means enthusiastic staff, but it does not mean knowledge about books.
If you’re in the uk, I think you’d understand the question.
Charity shops have sprung up all over on high streets, even while businesses around them fall. It’s not hard to imagine that the economics are different and that non-charity shops can’t compete due to lack of special tax treatment.
Interesting analysis. I'm somewhat confused by why anyone would think charity bookshops replacing secondhand bookshops would be a bad thing (if that were to actually be happening as the article suggests there isn't much evidence of this). Surely, to the shopper, they are exactly the same except one helps a charitable cause as a bonus.
I have found that second hand shops tend to have a more diverse and rich selection and charity shops can have very rare gems.
Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.
Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
“Charity” shops in my area are for profit businesses. Sure someone is getting a small donation, but their board members pull large salaries. Never mind their free inventory and usually underpaid labor.
Possibly, but gosh would it be hard for me to care.
In unrelated news, access to a pure, unfiltered spring drives out local bottled-water sellers.
We are in an era where even manufacturing physical copies of books is incredibly cheap. I'm not going to stress about charity bookshops disrupting scarcity in that ecosystem any more than I'm going to worry about libraries or the Internet doing so.
Interesting. I'm in Australia where I would also say that the number of second hand bookshops has greatly decreased in the last 20 years. New bookshops too for that matter. But I'm curious whether I'd also be wrong.
We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
I get almost all of my books from charity thrift stores and Friends of the Library shelves. If you read widely you generally can find something interesting for a dollar or so. I almost never go to a bookstore looking for something specific, though.
Not in my experience. I have a few feet of books that I bought at Carpe Librum in Washington, DC. But the odds one one finding something there are lower than at Second Story Books or Lost City Books, the two nearest used book stores.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.
> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.
For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
Powell's here in Portland seems to be doing pretty well with 68,000 square feet (6,300 square metres) sales floor space and millions of customers a year.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.
It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.
It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors
I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:
- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.
This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)
I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is an odd take, to me.
When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.
Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.
But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!
None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.
I don't want to just downvote and move on without an explanation. You're basically offering some of the arguments this article brings up and then dismisses, with evidence, so it seems like you didn't read the article and are offering your personal opinion as an argument.
shout out to haye on wye in wales where almost all the shops are second hand bookstores. that being said i bought no books there while i have bought a dozen or so from charity shops, the main reason being the price is so low they are basically being given away.
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.
amiga386|10 months ago
There has also been a growth in first-hand bookshops, especially specialists/curators (e.g. only selling sci-fi, only selling books by women, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the Waterstones and Blackwells of this world.
whartung|10 months ago
I distinctly recall getting a towel signed by Douglas Adams during one of his signings, I may have met Ellison there once.
Been a long time.
colechristensen|10 months ago
neilv|10 months ago
There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.
Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.
Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.
> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.
Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
benoau|10 months ago
And I know they have to do this, everything donated has to be checked to ensure safety and cleanliness, it costs them money to keep the shop open and staffed. But if you can't actually save money by buying secondhand goods there then why would anyone shop there?! It's a 10 - 20 percent discount on goods that may be years old when Amazon rotates these discounts through new goods 24/7.
Suppafly|10 months ago
BobaFloutist|10 months ago
asciimov|10 months ago
bombcar|10 months ago
jccalhoun|10 months ago
Or one of the Left Behind books.
detourdog|10 months ago
NYC in the 1990’s used to have a few neighborhoods full of bookstores. My favorite was just around 16th street in between 6th and Broadway.
sexy_devil|10 months ago
fidotron|10 months ago
Quite why this has occurred is a subject of occasional argument, but I've never heard a definitive theory on it, and it partly overlaps with the general decline motivated by ecommerce. They do compete on some level with existing businesses, as debated here, but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
jdietrich|10 months ago
For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.
Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.
As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
NoboruWataya|10 months ago
mywittyname|10 months ago
Not sure about UK, but in the USA, people have discovered that there's profit in mining thrift stores for quality products and reselling them. Usually online, but also in antique malls*. There are a quite a few apps that make it easy to look up something by picture and see what it's worth.
* not sure what Brits would call this - it's like brick and mortar ebay. Merchants rent out cubicles that they fill with random stuff, and customers check out at a common till when they are done.
t_luke|10 months ago
TulliusCicero|10 months ago
Could anyone elaborate on this?
kayo_20211030|10 months ago
jrmg|10 months ago
Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable.
Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of books people don’t want), so they tend to have a large collection of random books of not as high quality. They’re run by volunteers - which generally means enthusiastic staff, but it does not mean knowledge about books.
shermantanktop|10 months ago
Charity shops have sprung up all over on high streets, even while businesses around them fall. It’s not hard to imagine that the economics are different and that non-charity shops can’t compete due to lack of special tax treatment.
bpshaver|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
charlie-83|10 months ago
Affric|10 months ago
But charity bookshops have different motivations and appeal to different shoppers.
Essentially it’s only bad if you like reading good, hard to find books.
Or believe that others finding them when they might not particularly be looking for them is a common good.
SpaceManNabs|10 months ago
Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.
Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
asciimov|10 months ago
DadBase|10 months ago
shadowgovt|10 months ago
In unrelated news, access to a pure, unfiltered spring drives out local bottled-water sellers.
We are in an era where even manufacturing physical copies of books is incredibly cheap. I'm not going to stress about charity bookshops disrupting scarcity in that ecosystem any more than I'm going to worry about libraries or the Internet doing so.
stevage|10 months ago
We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
9283409232|10 months ago
xhevahir|10 months ago
cafard|10 months ago
AStonesThrow|10 months ago
Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness gracious.
jacobgkau|10 months ago
Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.
> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.
For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.
bigstrat2003|10 months ago
Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
voxadam|10 months ago
https://powells.com
alabastervlog|10 months ago
This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.
It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.
It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
bpshaver|10 months ago
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
Ugh.
rendx|10 months ago
I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
csdvrx|10 months ago
Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:
- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.
This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)
I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
Henchman21|10 months ago
This is an odd take, to me.
When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.
Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.
But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!
None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.
SpaceManNabs|10 months ago
Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.
I often liked the notes people left.
karaterobot|10 months ago
toofy|10 months ago
FridayoLeary|10 months ago
protocolture|10 months ago
They apparently have a website, and 2 other stores. I had no idea.
Certainly doesn't appear to be a business in decline.
And considering that being a bookshop in Sydney they compete with some absolute giants I am quite impressed tbh.
trod1234|10 months ago
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.