How Does the Circular Economy Affect the Literary Landscape?

There has been a multi-year focus here in the Netherlands on the circular economy. The core concept is simple and logical: the Circular Economy is a system by which materials are kept in use as long as possible through processes like reuse, recycling, maintenance, and remanufacture. This system aims to minimize the environmental impacts of goods and services by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of resources that are finite in availability.

Globally, this topic represents a formalization of many environmental improvements and is a design-based solution to numerous issues on our planet. Helpfully, it is a concept that is not bound to a specific industry or geography, and its core principles can be applied broadly. Because of this broad applicability, I want to look at the literary landscape through the lens of the circular economy.

The Physical Aspect of Books

Environmental aspects inevitably deal with the physical. Books as physical objects are composed of very simple components: paper, ink, and adhesive. From these three basic ingredients, hardcover books can add a layer of cardboard, and plastic can be introduced on some covers for durability. Even when looking at a more complicated construction, these materials are easy to recycle.

Several months ago, I had a conversation with Mathijs Suidman of Van der Velde Books. One of the most fascinating elements for me was a recycling effort by a company to recycle the paper in books that were being recycled. Apparently, paper without ink is far more valuable as a recycled product than paper with ink. When looking at a book’s pages, the margins around the text block are primarily clear of ink. If a recycling process could be designed to extract these inkless sections from a page, then a more valuable fraction of the books could be recovered.

This also brings up a point regarding the design of books. The margins of a book are inefficient from the perspective of material use. A more circular design of printed books would greatly minimize the margins to increase the amount of printed words on each page. This would reduce overall material use and provide large sustainability benefits.

Outside of this interesting anecdote about making recycling books even more efficient, it should be clear that the physical elements of books are easy to recycle. In Europe, the overall paper recycling rate is 71%. Paper can also be recycled 5–6 times before the fibers start to weaken to a point where they are no longer usable for printed pages. Due to their simple construction, books are very easy to get into recycling streams as well; there is no need for pre-treatment to get the materials to a point where they can be recycled.

Circularity Beyond Materials

Circular principles highlight the need to keep material in the form that maintains the highest and best use. For books, this use is clearly not being pulped and turned into raw materials for more writing. The contents of a book—the information and entertainment—are the primary value. This being the case, we should look at how easy it is to preserve and reuse books. When we look at this need for reduction, it becomes clear that books have been circular for a long time now.

When a book is read and the reader is finished, the contents do not change. It can take more than a dozen reads of a paperback or the passage of many decades before the spine of a book starts to separate and information is lost. Otherwise, the writing contained within a cover is a constant. From one reader to the next, a book provides the same value. This is due to the fact that a book is a very simple object. For more complicated products, the reuse question is fraught with maintenance, software updates, and easily damaged components. For books, there is only one variable to consider when looking at reuse: does anyone want to read this book?

The Growth of Secondhand Books

This inherent circularity is why readers are increasingly choosing used books. Overall book purchasing has been shrinking or stagnant across much of the world. Within this bigger picture, however, is a steady growth of secondhand sales. In France, for example, one out of every four books purchased is a used book. The secondhand book market is estimated at $25 billion in 2024. Estimates show that this slice of the book market will continue to grow relative to new book sales.

I think a great deal of this growth has to do with the margin on used books. Used books come into inventories through a couple of ways, but in all cases, getting rid of a book means that the original owner is no longer interested in having the book. Not to be grim, but when I was working at Books 4 Life Amsterdam, a great deal of the boxes of books that we received were from sons and daughters clearing out their parents’ house after they had passed. In these situations, or in situations where space is being made in a house, readers are happy to have these books go anywhere but the trash. On some level, people do not want to destroy any book. So a donation bin or a buyback service that offers a few dollars for their books feels like a great deal when the alternative is throwing everything in a trash can.

What this has created is an inflow of very low-cost or, in many cases, free inventory. I just went to a seller portal and took a look at my wife’s copy of The Artist’s Way. The book was recently released with a 30th anniversary edition and was on many bestseller lists a couple of months ago. World of Books will buy this book from me for $1.50. On their website, they are selling copies of this book for almost $17.00. You can see why secondhand selling is growing. With the right scale, businesses can capture huge amounts of low-cost inventory and offer it to customers to make a profit. I know of few other industries where circularity is so much more profitable than new products.

Authors and the Circular Economy

Circularity in books is clearly something that has been around for quite some time. Used bookstores are not a new hot idea. However, due to the current trends toward sustainability and the business opportunities of used books, it is a growing industry. So where do authors come into this? Unfortunately, author compensation is still very much based on the linear economy. Royalties are pegged to new sales. This is a system that has remained fundamentally unchanged for hundreds of years while the world has moved around writers, leaving them with the shortest end of an increasingly small stick.

For a long time, secondhand sales have been impossible to track at scale. As I have written previously, books did not have ISBNs until the 70s. With the complete infiltration of these barcodes for published works, we now have the base to track these sales. Increasingly, sellers are maintaining digital sales records as online sales become more and more important for reaching readers. Now, for the first time, the information on secondhand sales is available. This gives us a chance to link the secondhand economy with the writers.

The circular economy is fundamentally about reducing material inputs. This is of critical importance in a world where our resources are finite. While we work toward these systems, we must ensure that we do not inadvertently reduce inputs of inexhaustible materials.

Writers must be compensated for their work, and this includes secondhand sales. If the contents are not changing, then the writer must be paid for their work. The human experience is infinite, and so we must not throttle it by treating our creative inputs the same as our material inputs.