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“We are taking garbage [and] running it through a very sophisticated salvage process in our warehouses, to create or find or discover products people want, and then we sell them at a very, very cheap price,” Ward explains. Garbage isn’t a value judgment: His company, along with several other enormous used-book-selling operations that have popped up online in the past decade, is literally buying garbage. Thrift stores like Goodwill receive many more donations than they can physically accommodate. Employees rifle through donations, pick out the stuff that is most likely to sell and send the rest to a landfill. The same thing happens at public libraries; they can take only as many donations as their space and storage will allow, so eventually they have to dispose of books, too. (For libraries, the process is a little more complicated; they can’t legally sell books, so they essentially launder them through groups with names like Friends of the Library, which sell the discards and donate the proceeds to the library.)

If the penny booksellers haven’t noticeably cut into the publishing industry’s margins, their arrival has been more ominous for traditional used-book retailers. “It’s really a race to the bottom at this point,” says Carson Moss, the store buyer at the Strand, the 88-year-old Manhattan book emporium. “Everybody ends up fighting over 5 cents, 10 cents, a penny.” Moss says the penny booksellers are an occasional topic of conversation at the Strand, which also sells books on Amazon and elsewhere online. “I would say it has affected our ability to sell as many used books online,” he says. The penny booksellers are sometimes seen as forcing books into a new, disturbingly quick life cycle in which prices drop from full price to a few dollars in months, and then further to a penny in just a couple of years.