You can use all the fancy jargon you want. You say you have a triple bottom line but I would argue that you have no bottom line because you get your books for free. You then drive the price down to pennies which makes the whole book business even more untenable for anyone not on your scale. The fact that you donate books you can't sell does not make you a charity in my opinion. Right now your "social responsibility" appears to be largely rhetoric.

I am responding because I volunteer with BWB and do feel like I have a bit of understanding to address your concerns. However, my thoughts and opinions should not be taken as the thoughts and opinions of BWB. I would encourage you to personally speak with one of the founders/regional directors so that they can address your concerns.

I don’t see that you have given any proof of your argument that Better World Books has “no line at all”. The books are not for free as you claim them to be. Both intangible and financial costs exist for this company in order to obtain these textbooks and allow them to be used in a more resourceful way by worldwide communities in desperate need of such textbooks for their suffering literacy programmes.

One of the intangible costs that we cannot ignore is the level of thought and effort that the founders had placed into designing this program and continuously invest into this company. You can give a person a paycheque for their thoughts, but the true value of their actions can only be measured by the impact they have on the community they live in. Of course, how a donator/volunteer/employee/recipient of the donated textbooks feels they have been impacted is much different from a local small-scale vendor of used textbooks.

Some of the financial costs that help BWB to receive the textbooks include cost of shipping textbooks, cost of maintaining the warehouse, cost of equipment used in sorting through the textbooks, cost of setting up the website, cost of employing the individuals who will help to manage and operate the organization, and so on. The books that can be sold online provide the funding necessary to PAY for the above-mentioned costs. And yes, community members who are interested in supporting the initiative have donated these textbooks to BWB.

But if you are to claim that BWB is not a triple bottom line company because they did not initially PAY for the textbooks, then you have discounted how organizations around the world operate. Initially, all of our natural resources were free; they had no property rights associated to them, and were thus accessible to and usable by every single being on this planet. But, as our ancestors started to realize the value of these resources, they started to limit how much a person can use these resources. The increased consumption also led to scarcity of our resources, placing even more pressure for assigning property rights to natural resources and allowing individuals to make profits from such resources.

BWB donator’s have paid for the right to own the textbooks they are donating. With that right, they have the choice of selling the textbook to local and smaller scale vendors, throwing it away, burning it, etc. But they also have the choice to donate it to BWB, who, as I said earlier, has chosen to use the value of the textbooks in a more resourceful way. For example, instead of throwing a textbook out that is deemed “outdated” in a society where bookstores allow us to buy books that have different versions/quantities of the same information, we can allow another individual in desperate need of literacy resources to value the information present in the textbook and perhaps improve their living conditions.
So ultimately, it is up to the individual to decide what they feel is the best fate for their textbooks. BWB offers individuals the choice of aiding schools, libraries, and individuals for obtaining textbooks that are necessary for successful literacy programs; programs that lack current information and resources. They also offer individuals the choice of diverting textbooks from the main waste stream by allowing them to recycle their used books. Small-scale vendors on the other hand allow an individual to make a personal profit (although it’s not a profit when you consider how much you might pay for a textbook initially).

What does Triple Bottom Line even refer to? The organization seeks to maximize SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL and ECONOMIC profits, not for themselves, but for the individuals impacted by their decisions. The BWB websites are all wonderful in pointing to how BWB is a TBL organization. The staff-members are phenomenal at listening to concerns you might have in order to understand your point more clearly before trying to address your concerns. As it stands, I don’t see that you have provided sufficient information for them to respond back to you appropriately.