The strange case of the “Literature Litterbug”—a mystery perp who’s been dumping used books along a Colorado highway for a year or more—has come to a close, bringing with it a pun-filled police report and plenty of finger-pointing. Glenn Plasden admits that the littering citation was “by the book,” and explains that he simply couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the huge stock he acquired when a Boulder bookstore went out of business eight years ago; he’d been dumping them a few at a time from his moving car, figuring nobody would notice. At the Melville House blog, Liam O’Brien offers some perspective on the matter, positing that Amazon’s business tactics have devalued books and made the secondary market—which generates no money for publishers—unviable for small businesses (even those attempting to simply recycle books).
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