The Aspen Book Company warehouse kind of looks like an industrial bookstore. It still has long rows of tall, wooden bookshelves, each stacked to the brim. Owner Jacob Pinkerton estimates the shelves currently have around 65,000 books on them. But the books are not organized by genre or author – they’re stacked based on when they arrived.
Normally, Pinkerton is working on the business side of things, but today, he’s looking through the sea of books for someone’s order. Clipboard in hand, he weaves through each row, reciting the aisle and bay number out loud to remember.
He stops and pulls out a practice book for Bass Guitar. He moves a few shelves over and picks out a whole variety of orders.
“We got Rites Of Spring, We got Uninvited Study Guide, Chasing Midnight, Federal Rules Of Evidence, and we have Progressive Bass,” he said. “All over the board.”
These books are all used copies, usually coming from thrift stores or other shops with surplus inventory. His company buys used books by the truckload without knowing what they’ll get, and hopes to find some of value to resell. And with the back to school season in swing with students looking for deals, it’s about to get busy.
“In July, we sold 22,300 books,” Pinkerton said. “And yeah, that number is going up probably 15 to 20% per month.”
Pinkerton started this endeavor back in 2017 in Arizona. He was frustrated with his old job and was not feeling fulfilled. But then he saw a YouTube video of a guy selling used books from his kitchen table, and he thought he’d do the same thing.
“He was working nights and weekends, just anytime he could squeeze in a few extra hours,” his wife, Ashleigh Pinkerton, said. “And then (it) grew from listing and shipping from our kitchen table to a room in our house, and then it took over our garage, and it was around that time he decided, ‘I should start buying by the truckload and get a warehouse.’”
Since then, he moved his warehouse up to Denver – where it’s existed for about a year – and his company processes tons of books. Literally – they get 40,000 pounds of books, in huge, deep cardboard boxes, per truck.
Each book gets scanned to see if it’s a quality book, and then they’re listed to sell. After someone purchases it, the book is grabbed off the shelf, put in a mailer, and sent off. Anything that the company does not take gets recycled.
Pinkerton says they probably process around 10,000-12,000 books a day, and sell around 500 a day. Although they have their own e-commerce site, most of their sales are through platforms like Amazon or eBay. But he said it’s been successful.
“This is actually the biggest sales that we've had in any of my warehouses since the beginning,” he said. “The customer already has the habit of going to Amazon and ordering their books, and so it's an easy and simple thing for them just to buy from us, instead of somebody else, simply down to the price.”
The business of used books isn’t exactly cost-effective, Pinkerton said, due to the massive market for them and the hoops to jump through of recycling books. But it is worth it to him.
“Our motto here that we say after every morning meeting is ‘Replanting Stories,’” Pinkerton said. “These are books that have already had one life, and we're trying to give them second life.”
His wife, Ashleigh Pinkerton, said she hopes more people see the adventure and fun of buying a used book.
“There is something interesting and intriguing about getting a book that has somebody else's notes and highlighting in it,” she said. “To see what stuck out to the first person who read this, and what takeaways did they learn from this book? That’s something I personally enjoy.”
