In the case of Book Patrol, I suspect that the 25% going to charities are those of only marginal value, while the remaining 24% that they sell online are the most valuable. Cream skimming rather than recycling.

I’d love to see an organization develop that would transport entire shipping containers of the more useful books to poorer countries, where they’d be given to vendors to sell at low prices. It’d do a lot more good than giving kids tiny green computers that cost more than their parents earn in six months.

Why the shipping containers? In the 1980s, I shipped hundreds of books to schools in Bangladesh, India and Zambia at a special bulk rate for books that was about 50 cents a pound. Now the post office tells me I can’t do that, that I have to use something like global priority mail. Shipping costs about 10 times the old price and often more than the new price of a book.

Adding good books to relief shipments and sending them by the container load would get them cheaply to countries that have too few books.

At present, the only way I know to get books overseas cheaply is to send them to someone with a U.S. military APO address in the county. Those rates are the same is shipping inside the U.S. and include a ‘media rate’ that’s not too costly.