Seeing advertisements for book sales usually excites me. I always gather a bunch of friends to file through endless stacks of antique copies that are sold for five dollars. The idea of being able to purchase as many books as I want with my limited budget is vastly appealing, but lately my positive outlook on book sales has lessened.

In a publishing class I am taking this semester, I have learned about the printing of books, and the effort put into getting a book edited and published. Writers spend years crafting a masterpiece, and hardly succeed on the first try. Publishing is an extremely undervalued business, for people care about the finished product of books and less about the process it takes to accomplish a final copy.

Think of how many of those copies end up in a book sale. Underneath the books with pictures of kittens, guides to traveling, and old copies of Dr. Seuss, lies that gem of literature about the girl locked in a garden. If you keep looking you may find a story of the man searching for his wife through the tundra, or animals plotting escape from a farm.

Every writer’s idea has been thought, executed and endlessly edited. Where is it now? In the .50 box of the small book sale on the next street—that’s where.

Although they are known for their unlimited genre piles and freebies, book sales are a literary graveyard. The stories written sell for a depressing amount of money when they could be sold at full price in a bookstore. It is also a dumping ground for people who need to rid of useless objects in their house, and no longer want the burden of the book that keeps collecting dust.

Every book sale I attend from now on will be a funeral. I will mourn for the bodies of books that are before me, and say a prayer for the ones that may still make it.