The no-Amazon thing is maybe a little complicated. Many 'independent' book dealers have deals with Amazon, for example to use Amazon's shipping, inventory, or print on demand infrastructure, to sell through Amazon either exclusively or non-exclusively, or to be a channel through which Amazon routes divests books returned to Amazon. Those deals with Amazon make Amazon money and make Amazon more powerful, because Amazon can impose anti-competitive terms on the potential competitors who make such deals with them. The California attorney general recently announced a suit to try to stop these anti-competitive b2b deals by Amazon, but it is very hard to constrain such Goliaths. I would rather exclude every seller who has any business relationship with Amazon from my book search results, but there is no way to know who does or doesn't, as there is no required disclosure of such things, and lawyers are good at hiding them.

The market for inexpensive copies of books in the US is a complete mess, particularly wrt used books. If you look on-line, you can find lots and lots of used books for sale from book dealers. Many are priced way above what they cost new or what a similar new book would sell for today. Many books recently released are available in used condition at prices well above what the same books are still selling for new -- ie the original publisher's list price -- why is that? Even stranger, if you have used books that you have read and want to sell, you will have a very hard time finding any book dealers who want to buy them. Most used book dealers don't buy used books from people who buy and read books. A few will, but they are very selective and almost all of them offer only in-store credit, not money. But they all have lots of used books listed for sale at $20 to $100 or more plus shipping. Where do they get their books? Are books that we donate to thrift shops and library book sales getting recycled through the book dealers at such high prices? It looks like that may be what's going on.

I know that these dealers have expenses, and many of them may not even be very profitable, but modern automation and materials handling machines are amazing and are supposed to allow very efficient management of inventories and sales, and that's not what we've got. If the typical used book was listed like on the OTC stock market, the bid price would be around 25 cents and the ask price would be around 50 dollars. Market failure. What's it take to fix it?

>if you have used books that you have read and want to sell, you will have a very hard time finding any book dealers who want to buy them

Random used books have very little value. My town library just had its annual book sale which comes from some combination of donations over the course of the year and culling its collection. Depending on the day of the sale it was $10-$20 for a paper grocery bag of books. And, yes, there are probably book dealers looking for the odd item that's worth more than that. That's actually a useful market mechanism.

We tend to think of books as something unique but, in general, the cost of connecting your old stuff to someone who might actually want it is often higher than the value of the item. I have a bunch of things that someone would probably pay some amount of money for but the time and effort to list on eBay might net me minimum wage.

> My town library just had its annual book sale which comes from some combination of donations over the course of the year and culling its collection. Depending on the day of the sale it was $10-$20

Yes, library sales are wonderful. Random books at garage sales and library sales are very inexpensive. My question is, what happens to the books at the library sale that are unsold there?

Our information age with everyone wearing and carrying multiple computers is not doing anything to make particular books more affordable to anyone. If you want to buy a particular book, you have a hard time beating the prices that the huge Amazon consortium maintains. The modern technology has taken over and re-shaped the economy to the point where someone who wants to shop from a large selection of books does not even think about trying to walk into a book store, but the efficiencies of Amazon, et al., have not delivered a bounteous improvement in connecting people to stuff over what the mail order operations of Montgomery Ward in the 1890's and Sears in the early 1900's provided. The promised techno-age economy of mass specialization and mass customization is proving elusive.

> That's actually a useful market mechanism.

There is some question about how one can force fit a competitive market model onto what is going on here. The market in particular titles is so thin that it is hardly a market. I can't sell at any price titles that I can buy on-line at $35 or $50. What makes the odd item worth more? The odd sale at $100 or $150 every few years to the one or few buyers obsessed or wealthy enough to pay that? There may be another possible market equilibrium that our current move-fast-and-break-things system is unable to find, in which twenty times the volume flows at one tenth the price.

>My question is, what happens to the books at the library sale that are unsold there?

The same thing that happens to literally tons of other paper with ink/toner on it. It gets pulped or whatever. I'm not sure how books could have a particular conduit from random item that someone really would prize to that person.

There are computers, and internet, and book sorting machines with up to 8 output bins, and nobody can afford to put together a book and a person who is willing to pay an hour's wages plus shipping and handling?

I came here to suggest exactly that filter!