Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

Remember, because of the weird specific way publishing is set up, if a book doesn't sell as well as the model had estimated, all those bookstores will be free to send unsold inventory back to publishers like Norton.

This is a massive challenge that the publishing industry has adapted to over the years with a few different techniques.

The first is called remaindering.

That means selling off unsold books at a huge discount.

So when you see a third-party retailer on Amazon selling books for way less than the listed price or 50% off bargain bins at a bookstore, those are often remainders.

Publishers often ask that remaindered books are marked in some ways so they don't re-enter the regular market.

So you might see a book with a black Sharpie mark on the side or a hole punched out of the barcode.

Sometimes, however, publishers decide it actually makes more economic sense to cut their losses entirely and simply destroy unsold inventory by pulping it.

Basically ripping a book apart so it can be recycled into new paper and other products.

Because for publishers, it's not a good look to have a ton of your precious works in the bargain bin.

Or to have too many hardcovers on sale when they're about to, say, release a new paperback.

Stephen points to the example of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, published by Simon & Schuster a few years ago.

It sold very well for a while, right?

And then one day it just stopped.

Stephen doesn't know the actual numbers of leftover books here, but he says it could easily be in the hundreds of thousands.

Stephen says they'd likely try to sell off a big chunk of books, depending on the remainders market, and then pulp the rest.

So it's trying to sort of like minimize your losses.

Have you ever seen a batch of books being pulped?

Yes.

This was back in the 90s.