Hmm... so, at first blush at least, this sounds like a pretty Big Deal, and a Good Thing. From the press release:
Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner the Internet Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to come.
This new relationship will allow Better World Books to provide a steady stream of books to be digitized by the Internet Archive, thereby growing its digital holdings to millions of books. Libraries that work alongside Better World Books will now make a bigger impact than ever. Any book that does not yet exist in digital form will go into a pipeline for future digitization, preservation and access.
Sounds good to me. Of course, there's a big difference between issuing a press release and actually doing something. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in reality.
Better World Books has in my experience been purposefully misleading about the structure and purpose of their business. They put book donation boxes everywhere that are covered in "save the children" style graphics and messages.
But the reality is, they are a for profit company that very much enriched the owners while donating a very small percentage to charity. And it's one thing to have a corporation that does social good. But their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity. They also make deals with public libraries to sell their books online and take a big cut.
Which makes me suspicious of this new arrangement. So it is now a for profit corporation owned by a non-profit?
Did the owners decide to reorganize or donate the whole business or something?
According to their website, they have donated $28,000,000 and 26,000,000 books. These seem to be separate activities, i. e. the money is straight-up cash given independently of the donation of books.
I'm not sure if that fits with your characterisation as "a very small percentage". They don't seem to publish profit numbers, making this somewhat unanswerable.
But having read the press release and website, I did no get the impression that this was necessarily a non-profit. There are dozens of "free shipping", "sale", "save", "bargain" claims, and barely any of do-goodery (the name, plus those donation numbers at the very bottom). "Non-profit" is mentioned nowhere on their site, and they characterise themselves as a "social venture", a term that means exactly what they are.
Notice they say, "Donate books here". But you aren't donating. That's a total lie. Any more than giving free merchandise to Walmart is "donating it" because walmart gives to charity every year.
No one goes directly to their website. They sell primarily on 3rd party sites, so they probably decided to clean up the site a bit. I remember it being much more misleading in the past. I'm sure you could look on the wayback machine.
As for the large number of books given away, that is simply a cheap way for them to get rid of the books that are worthless. Otherwise, they would have to pay to have them hauled off.
And you'll also notice that they don't say they have "donated" $26m to charity. They say they have raised $26m for charity. Not sure what that means, but it sounds more like they are soliciting donations from others. Maybe they are providing matching funds in some cases or maybe they are just organizing donation programs.
Also, that number is the amount raised since 15+ years ago. They have annual sales estimated around $75m a year. So $26m lifetime is rather small.
In the past, they prominently offered ‘free worldwide shipping’ but silently changed their prices according to the incoming IP. (This has now been fixed, possibly because they did ship orders placed in the US at the US-disclosed prices.)
As a prior BWB employee (with no equity or outcome from this sale) I'm happy to respond to some of these concerns.
"Very much enriched the owners" is quite a stretch. Especially considering pretty much every equity holder was wiped out ~5 years ago when they had to raise money to stay in business.
The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco. Before that he lived in a townhome in suburban Atlanta. This business is not and never has thrown off cash. At best they've made as much money in profit as they've donated, in cash, to literacy causes over the life of the business.
A "very small percentage" donated to charity is up for debate based on everyone's belief of what that means, but all charity payments were made as a percentage of net sales revenue, which was essentially the money that came in from any sale. The only cost that was subtracted out was marketplace fees when selling on Amazon, ebay, etc. Sales percentage back to the book sources (academic and public libraries) and non-profit partners (on all sales from all sources) were paid out before shipping costs were even accounted for.
"Their entire business is based on receiving donated books from people who think they are donating to charity" is not true. Drop box books accounted for < 10% of all books sourced and even less than that of revenue since those books are typically the lowest quality stream (slightly better title mix than thrift purchases, but much higher logistics cost and risk of spoilage). The business is almost entirely dependent on public and academic library partnerships.
There were many, MANY monthly all hands meetings we sat in where the business lost money but wrote 6 or 7 figure checks to literacy partners. Donations were not a function of making money.
BWB was a great company full of people who truly cared about the mission. Some people did well, but nobody got rich off this business. If they didn't move most of the corporate activity out of Atlanta and up to Indiana I would still have been happy to keep working there.
>The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco.
So your evidence that one of the founders didn't make a lot of money is that he owns a million dollar home in central indiana? A $1m home in the midwest is going to be very, very nice and probably an order of magnitude more expensive than the average home in the area ($148k in Indiana).
But that is good to hear that they really are donating money. Because their huge "Donate books here" boxes are very misleading.
Do you know any one at Jenson Books or who the owner might be :) That's the biggest mystery from my entire time selling books on Amazon. They're by far and away the most frustrating seller in the marketplace.
I truly despise them. They can't POSSIBLY make money on so much of their inventory without lower negotiated FBA rates from Amazon. It's not just a few like with BWB, but over 75% of their inventory seems entirely unreasonable to sell at their market price.
Ebay is where I get my out of circulation library books for really cheap. I just picked up a never loaned "Toward Artificial Sapience : Principles and Methods for Wise Systems" for $3.73. On Thriftbooks it's $156. Looking back, the seller was "BetterWorldBooks"!
I have ordered from Thriftbooks dozens of times. The only two things that happened was one package theft (obviously not their fault, but they re-sent the books for free, no questions asked), and one extra shipment of books I had not ordered (this was probably someone else's order that they sent me).
Interesting... I've bought probably two dozen books from them over the past couple of years (via their Amazon storefront) and I've never had a problem with them.
Order cancellations here as well, after books have been sent out and returned as undeliverable. Have not ever had that happen with any other shipment to my address, so I suspect they have a recurring issue with label printing. Their customer support just ignored me when I brought that up (several times) and issued a refund without any explanation.
Yes, it's suspicious and I have questions. But it's also plausible that it's all legit.
People who donate books often overestimate what their books are worth. Selling the books and using the money to fund the library (which can buy books it actually wants) might be more efficient than paid staff handling a bunch of books they mostly don't want. What's the expense on doing the work themselves, and can outsourcing beat that?
Also, it seems like people who donate stuff have lots of other illusions about how much good they're really doing, and the people actually doing the work will entertain those illusions, but they have to deal with reality. Personally, I'm fine with anyone who takes stuff I don't want off my hands for free with no hassle.
Hmm. Especially knowing that being a nonprofit is one of the things that will support your claim to being a "library" as far as the parts of the copyright code that give libraries special rights to copy things others don't have (which is part of what the IA relies on)... now I'm suspicious too.
Maybe it's just due to the current sociopolitical environment we are living in but "socially conscious" makes me wonder if they'll decide which books are worth preserving and which are not.
Mek here from Internet Archive's OpenLibrary.org. We've thought carefully about this as well.
We feel it's critical that Internet Archive and Better World Books aren't the only organizations involved in determining which books should be preserved.
In late October, we launched a new program which allows anyone in the world to take control of our Library's shelves and contribute/sponsor the books which reflect their values:
https://openlibrary.org/sponsorship
So far we've seen an influx of high quality reference books come in (everything from African antiquity to Microbial biology) that we almost certainly wouldn't have procured ourselves based solely on the data available from e.g. library holdings, wikipedia citations, etc.
Having Better World Books as a partner has been incredibly helpful because we're able to calculate sponsorship prices quite accuracy (because shipping prices are included) which was a big challenge with other APIs we previously used. Also importantly, Better World Books helps our patrons sponsor older books which are often more at risk of disappearing, which is one (of many) useful heuristics when considering preservation.
Is the number of digital copies you can lend out limited by only how many physical books you have "dematerialized"? For example, if I shipped 10 used copies of a book to Open Library and you recorded you destroyed them, could you lend out 10 digital copies at a time?
This question appears in https://controlleddigitallending.org/faq. Specifically for our sponsorship program at this stage, we decided to limit eligible books to those we had no copies of (in the interest of maximizing preservation -- we're as much an archive as we are a library).
In general we're not thrilled about books being destroyed. There's always someone who can benefit from a book. Also, one never knows when a book may have to be scanned again because a digital copy could theoretically become lost, corrupt, or benefit from new tech (e.g. a palimpsest). These are all big reasons our digitization process is explicitly non-destructive.
http://openlibraries.online describes how we are working with other Library partners and including them in our model to help make works more broadly available.
None of this directly answers your question which is probably better answered by a lawyer. I'm just a fake librarian.
I love this. Individual self interest for the collective benefit.
Now, I wish there was something like this for translation and summarisation. I'm a fiend for renaissance/enlightenment lit that is in Latin or just hard to read -- but amazing and world changing.
Better World Books, the world’s leading socially conscious online bookseller, is now owned by Better World Libraries, a mission-aligned, not-for-profit organization that is affiliated with longtime partner the Internet Archive. This groundbreaking partnership will allow both organizations to pursue their collective mission of making knowledge universally accessible to readers everywhere. This new relationship will provide additional resources and newfound synergies backed by a shared enthusiasm for advancing global literacy. Together, the two organizations are expanding the digital frontier of book preservation to ensure books are accessible to all for generations to come.
This new relationship will allow Better World Books to provide a steady stream of books to be digitized by the Internet Archive, thereby growing its digital holdings to millions of books. Libraries that work alongside Better World Books will now make a bigger impact than ever. Any book that does not yet exist in digital form will go into a pipeline for future digitization, preservation and access.
Sounds good to me. Of course, there's a big difference between issuing a press release and actually doing something. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in reality.