Earlier quoted context omitted.
My father is a used bookdealer and one of his sources of inventory on occasion has been library discards. (Books with library markings that are sold online ought to be marked "ex-library", not just "used", so that the buyer isn't surprised by this.) But it's amazing to see this level of automation and scale. My father was manually cataloguing everything and then selling ex-library books for at least a few dollars api…
Random anecdote time. At a used bookstore recently (in Hobart Book Village), my too-young-to-read daughter took a fancy to _The Life of a Bear_, probably because of its 24 illustrated prints involving bears. After realizing it was a ~120 year old book and gently extracting it before she removed one of the pictures, I became slightly fascinated with it. It appears to be a perfectly cromulent children's chapter book, o…
* Black Beauty is a phenomenally well-written book, with fair comparisons to Bronte, Hardy and Dickens; and is certainly not viewed as a "children's book"
* written about horses at a time when horses were the world's most owned animal;
* and also at a bleak moment in the Industrial Revolution when the workhouse, child labor, and workplace hazards were at a local maximum.
So a fair mix of good timing and subject matter, combined with an excellent execution.
Anyway tldr everyone should re-read Black Beauty.