I visited a secondhand bookshop named BOOK-OFF. Far away from here, there is a district called 神保町(jinbou-chou) in Tokyo. It has more secondhand bookshops than any other district in Japan. BOOK-OF shops are very different from those in 神保町. They do not sell expensive books. Many of the books are sold at 100 to 1000 yen. They disregard so-called market values. They buy books from you in a certain way–perhaps, considering only the size, cleanliness and publication year of the used books. In ordinary secondhand bookshops they know the market values, and the prices of some rare old books are very high. This does not apply at BOOK-OFF shops. I think I will not sell my books there, though I sometimes find a bargain and buy it there.
It’s surprising that any store nowadays doesn’t care about market value when it just takes a scanner attachment to a phone and an app to instantly know the market value of a book.
@jolanda Hard-off isn’t a term as far as I’m aware so I can’t be sure what dooo was thinking when he saw the sign. If I saw it I would probably laugh to myself as well. I’d laugh because I know what a **- (I’d rather not type it) is and the sign would make me wonder what a hard off would be then.
Think of “Game on!” from the movie Wayne’s World (GAME ON! - YouTube). Now you can imagine replacing “Car!” with “Game off!”
If you apply the same sort of logic to “hard off”…That’s what I’d be thinking about at least.
I hear that some people visit BOOK-OFF shops in order to get bargains and sell them elsewhere at so-called market values. That process is called ‘せどり’ in Japanese.