The canceled book trade

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Kosher Dill said:
Most of that stuff just falls down the memory hole on its own without needing to be cancelled though.
To cash in, it really would have to follow the Dr. Seuss model - a beloved book that's still under copyright gets pulled out of print by its owners with a big media splash, Fox News whips up a big boomer reaction, and you jump in right at that moment and dump your stock.

Another instructive example is the most famous "cancelled" book of all, Little Black Sambo, which I believe was pulled from print sometime in the 80s. It's not hard or expensive at all to get a hold of a copy now on the used market.
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Some places do publish Little Black Sambo. Because it is public domain, there is not as much monetary risk involved as copyrighted material, no one to pay royalties to. You are right about most books being memory holed, but many books that still have copyrights are gradually changed in the hopes of accommodating the current narrative; remove a word here or there; change the cover artwork so it implies more diversity, etc. The book would have to be beloved enough that people still care and there is no way to salvage it, ala the Seuss books since the artwork is integral.
 
Lots of memoirs are out of print specifically those that haven't been reprinted.
 
Gigabrain idea. Write your own book and self publish 1000 copies. Then start a cancel campaign on yourself. Once the book gets pulled from amazon you start scalping it on ebay. Rinse and repeat till you're harvesting moon wheat.
 
You have to be buying re-editions of cancelled books. Best example is of course re-editions of Mein Kampf, but David Irving's books and books by famous nazis like Degrelle are also good. Your best bet is these new "critical" editions of Mein Kampf, very often it all gets sold within the first day it hits the bookstores, so you gotta be fast, grab like 20-50 copies (or as much as you can get) and start reselling gradually after few months
 
Books about niche historical figures, like Skorzeny, 'the most wanted man in europe', are pretty safe bets, provided they're in a good - pristine condition. They may not be cancelled per se, but they're certainly out of print.

Your local school district's 'banned books' list of YA fiction is a decent list, especially if it's the edition that prompted the ban or a first edition.
 
Pixy said:
Books about niche historical figures, like Skorzeny, 'the most wanted man in europe', are pretty safe bets, provided they're in a good - pristine condition. They may not be cancelled per se, but they're certainly out of print.

Your local school district's 'banned books' list of YA fiction is a decent list, especially if it's the edition that prompted the ban or a first edition.
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I hate to rain on your great plan to get rich, but Banned Book Lists are something of a misnomer. Twilight is on a lot of them for example. If memory servers when Herry Potter first came out it was on that list too because of the pagan or christian symbolism or something. I bet these list are just books that autistic religious people would harass the school for exposing there kids to. It's just doge so the school doesn't have to take a political position on whether students are allow to read about wizards on their lunch break.

<https://seattle.bibliocommons.com/list/share/491055517/697509160>
The Giver is a bit of a red flag. The Giver is about communism, but it's so metaphorical it would go over most kids heads. Anything overtly violent is also bound to be on the list for the same reason as Herry Potter. Schools generally don't like having to take heat form parents when it comes to how kids are exposed to adult topics.

Nazi books are probably going to be gold to the few private collectors who have them. I don't see a market for there sale. It's not like you can sell Rembrandt or Van Gogh paintings. The Nazi books would be so contentious that no owners would publicly display them or trade in them. Maybe terrorist manifestos would be lucrative. Thinking or Elliot Roger and Christ Church, but how many rich people do you know today who want to own original Charles Chiniquy or Guy Fawkes? I wouldn't go out for any of this stuff, but please prove me wrong.
 
stares at error messages said:
Nazi books are probably going to be gold to the few private collectors who have them. I don't see a market for there sale. It's not like you can sell Rembrandt or Van Gogh paintings. The Nazi books would be so contentious that no owners would publicly display them or trade in them. Maybe terrorist manifestos would be lucrative. Thinking or Elliot Roger and Christ Church, but how many rich people do you know today who want to own original Charles Chiniquy or Guy Fawkes? I wouldn't go out for any of this stuff, but please prove me wrong.
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Nazi-era collectables have all sorts of cottage industries that've popped up around making fakes, so you'd also have to invest in getting them authenticated. They handed out gold-plated Leicas to troops who met certain criteria, but after the Russians took all the camera manufacturing equipment with them as part of reparations and began pumping out high-quality Leica copies, there's dozens of those cameras on online resellers.
 
yeah I think the most viable way to do this is wait for a book to get cancelled, swoop by local thrift stores and pick up copies for pocket change, then flip them on ebay or something to people aiming to be scalpers in their own right
 
Cancelled book: "Philip Roth: The Biography"
www.nytimes.com

Norton Takes Philip Roth Biography Out of Print

The publisher also said it would make a donation to sexual abuse organizations equal to the advance it paid Blake Bailey, the author accused of sexual assault.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

We're getting closer to an investment-grade cancelled book since this one wasn't in print for long and might have some intrinsic interest. But Roth wrote about himself so much already that the world may not be noticeably poorer for the loss of a biography.
 
Cancelation or not, there has always been money in buying and selling books, especially rare ones. It was the foundation of Jeff Bezos' empire after all.

The keys are the same as any other market.

Supply: 2 things will survive the apocalypse, cockroaches, and the millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code and Left Behind filling clearance bins in every used book store in America.

Pay attention to rare, hard to find, older books.

Demand: Either focus on the stuff everyone knows about - big name authors, popular topics - or something with limited demand, but the right buyer would pay a fortune for.

Condition: This one is the killer, especially for older books. People are rough on books, especially paperbacks. Old ones get mildew/mold and yellow, pages get folded or torn, they lose dust jackets.

My best tip? Auction houses, estate/yard sales are your friend. Book stores tend to know what they're dealing with, especially used or specialty book stores, and Amazon isn't going to haggle with you. People looking to offload grandpa's rare Civil War books, not so much.
 
Rare books are always a market, but some of the prices you see online have to do with a specific Amazon algorithm, if not outright money laundering. There are books that most people won't care about to read ever that I've seen go up to $1000.

themarkup.org

Why Am I Paying $60 for That Bag of Rice on Amazon.com? – The Markup

Dynamic pricing algorithms on Amazon aren’t just about supply and demand
themarkup.org themarkup.org

If you have the money, the Pernkopf Anatomy of Man is widely regarded as the best set of medical anatomy books ever. It was also created by dissecting NSDAP political prisoners. For this reason it is unlikely to be reprinted ever.

en.wikipedia.org

Eduard Pernkopf - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
www.bbc.com

Eduard Pernkopf: The Nazi book of anatomy still used by surgeons

Eduard Pernkopf created an "atlas" of anatomy by dissecting the bodies of Nazi political prisoners.
www.bbc.com
www.statnews.com

The surgeon had a dilemma only a Nazi medical text could resolve. Was it ethical to use it?

A St. Louis surgeon wondered whether she did the right thing when she consulted a Nazi anatomy book during a difficult operation.
www.statnews.com www.statnews.com
 
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>Write your own book
>release it
>get a pr company to come up with some controversy. Or just buy some twitter bots to generate controversy
>pull book
>sell it to scalpers online for inflated prices
>profit

I'll tag @Syaoran Li since they know about controverial books and shit.
 
tehpope said:
>Write your own book
>release it
>get a pr company to come up with some controversy. Or just buy some twitter bots to generate controversy
>pull book
>sell it to scalpers online for inflated prices
>profit

I'll tag @Syaoran Li since they know about controverial books and shit.
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Honestly, fake controversy and self-cancellation followed by a quick and sudden "un-cancellation" could be an interesting way to boost sales if you do it right.

Controversy usually sells and as long as your false flag isn't so utterly effective that Amazon bans your book, it could work.

I still think "cancelled books on the black market" is way too niche for a get rich quick scheme.
 
Another angle is books that become controversial after going out of print on their own. Example:
Metal Men - a biography of the notorious billionaire financier and friend of the Clintons, Marc Rich. Originally published back in 1985 when no one particularly cared who Rich was, the book became highly sought-after and stratospherically expensive after President Clinton notoriously pardoned him. Oddly, it was huge in Japan - there were even book clubs devoted to reading it there.
Of course, as you can see it eventually got reprinted and any commoner can just order a copy.

It might be difficult to identify prospects like this in advance though - in 1985 no one much cared who Bill Clinton was either.
 
>find some very edgy but totally obscure book
>random self-published manifesto from a nutcase nobody's heard of
>buy thousands of copies, print off as many as you can
>wait for next huge media event to occur (mass shooting, etc)
>come up with a bunch of faked screenshots of the person saying their whole philosophy was derived from that book
>"everyone who wants to understand what i did, must read this"
>wait for it to be pulled from every bookseller
>???
>profit
 
Why not offer insurance policies against getting canceled?
 
I don't know shit about books because I can't read, so I'll just go buy up a million copies of this:

10848473-1377705696-585589.jpg

It's the only DS game to have the N word in it a bunch of times, lol.
 
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