Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

We stride into a well-lit storage space that’s divided by hundreds of red and blue carts holding roughly forty beat-up banker’s boxes each. According to Kominato, the individual boxes contain at least twenty used books, DVDs, and CDs that their owners are selling to Bookoff Online, Bookoff’s rapidly expanding e-commerce unit. Rather than go through the trouble of taking them to a used bookshop, they take advantage of a process Bookoff has designed to simplify the process of unloading stuff: simply pack a box, print a shipping label, and call for a pickup. Kominato says that Bookoff receives around 3,000 boxes per day containing around 150,000 items, the vast majority of which are books. This is no cleanout; it’s a black hole that sucks in volumes the moment a book owner loosens her grip. We walk up a set of stairs to the second floor. As we emerge on the landing, I step back to let a worker push past with a cart the size of a hot tub filled waist-high with hundreds of books. “Those are being recycled,” Kominato says. Bookoff is Japan’s largest used-book buyer and seller. But not every used book has a buyer and, as a result, Bookoff is likely Japan’s largest book recycler, too. According to Kominato, the company sends thirty-five thousand tons of books to paper recyclers every year. That’s three and a half times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, measured out in individual, unwanted volumes: romances, histories, dictionaries, classics, cookbooks. It’s a heartbreaking number—es...