Second Chances for Deserving Books

One of the things that Libertary has changed for me is the way I look at books on remainder tables. They used seem like the end of the line: victims of a brutal and rigged market, mistimed or otherwise unsuccessful marketing—and for the author, years of the most arduous work for little or no pay.

But Libertary can breath life into books that deserve a better shot than traditional publishing has given them. Three books on our site show how. Environmental activists working to preserve Washington State's North Cascades region are now linked on Libertary to Kathie Durbin's Tree Huggers, a passionate account of the political battles over Pacific Northwest forests in the 1970s and '80s. Fatal Flaw, Phillip Finch's exploration of a murder unsolved for 30 years and an unjust conviction, continues on Libertary to attract attract readers opposed to the death penalty. And Home Field, a collection of quiet and personal stories about baseball, edited by John Douglas Marshall, was ahead of its time when first published in 1997. Now it gets a chance to reach its true audience. Without Libertary, these books and hundreds of new readers would never have found each other.