Thursday, January 20, 2011

The 8.5 Million Dollar Used Book Investment


There's a local story in the Seattle Times about used books on the internet.

From the piece...

Thrift Recycling Management, one of the largest used-book distributors on the Internet, has received an $8.5 million venture-capital investment that could extend the company's reach and help keep millions of books out of landfills.

Based in Lakewood, TRM was started by CEO Phil McMullin while he was working at Bellevue-based Savers, which runs the chain of 220-plus thrift shops known locally as Value Village.

He noticed that every month the company was sending to landfills masses of books that wouldn't sell in the stores. "At the time, it was throwing away nearly a million books a month," he said.

McMullin originally worked with Savers to sell some of those books online, but when the company dropped the program, he left in 2004 to begin TRM.

Since then the company has added seven additional distribution centers around the U.S. and Canada and has sold more than 15 million books.

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