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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

I remember going to several questionable bookshops that sold coverless books quite cheaply (frequently $1/$2 for a lb of books). As a kid it was an excellent way to stock up on books.

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When I was a kid I had a nice cache of coverless books I'd retrieved from the trash bin behind the local Crown Books.

Selling books by the pound sounds sacrilegious to me.

I guess I'm not such a voracious reader that I'm buying in bulk like that.

You can also buy books by the linear foot. Apparently when WFH got going big time it caused a huge spike in demand as people wanted filled bookshelves as a backdrop for video calls.

Wow. I remember reading about buying books by the foot in a communist satire book, I didn't expect reality to catch on that quickly.

I imagine on the torrent sites there's a demand for book covers you can print yourself.

Having just done a quick check, I'm surprised there's not!

I suspect that if you’re the type of person who might think to torrent a book cover, you’d probably just torrent the whole book.

The implication is that a bookseller would print them so they can sell their "unsold" books.

That's a fair amount of effort, expense (printing), and labor (assembly) just to try to sell a book that you've already determined isn't selling very well!

It might also be fraud where selling a coverless books is just breach of contract? IANAL but would be interested in finding out

I suppose you could do it for books that were selling well, but they might get suspicious if your bookstore was the only one.

You can usually download high res covers from Amazon if you want.

Just like the album cover scrapers of yore (and probably still...)

These booksellers could just make copies of the ones they have.

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