Considering a Scanner Darkly

When I went to the Unitarian church book sale back in March, I shot this admittedly bad photo of a man who was using a barcode scanner as he went through the books.

I took the photo because I had no idea what he was doing. I thought perhaps he was an obsessive-compulsive book collector who was cataloging his purchases as he went.

Well, it turns out that it's de rigueur for used-book-sellers to wield scanners to determine the value of books before buying them. Sunday's Star Tribune contained this story about how some local library book sales are starting to ban the scanners as a matter of fairness to the nonprofessional shoppers (better known as "the public"). Many other libraries still allow the devices.

From reading the article and some other sources online, what everyone seems to agree on is that scanner users should scan at the table of books as they go, rather than grab a pile of books and take them off to a corner to scan, which not only takes the books out of view of other shoppers, it also creates a pile of work for the sale's volunteers to reshelve the books.

Not hoarding books seems like common sense and common courtesy. It really annoys me that people take advantage of volunteer-run events like book sales for their own selfish purposes, without regard to the common good, and end up forcing the organizations to establish rules to deal with a small number of abusers.