Books

A novel, a school text or a book with a subject of its own:

most of what families pass on is one of the first two, and the rest is easiest to find by subject. Cookbooks are bought for the recipes, so a stained page matters less than a missing one. A coloring book is priced by its untouched pages, and the picture books in animal books are usually set aside long before they wear out. Trail and birding guides sit under outdoor books, pregnancy and sleep titles under parenting books. With fiction, format and language decide which copy suits you. A mass-market paperback is light but its glued spine gives out after a few readings, while a hardback is for keeping or giving. Many readers in Panama want the English original, and a Spanish translation published in Spain carries Peninsular forms of address that some readers here would rather avoid, so the translator matters as much as the title.

Textbooks on a Panamanian school list:

each line names a title, a publisher and a grade, and a used copy has to match all three plus the edition. Spanish-language subjects usually come from publishers such as Santillana, while bilingual schools assign English reading, science and maths courses from Pearson, Savvas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oxford or Cambridge. Those courses often come packaged with digital access that expires with the school year or activates only once, so a second-hand student book usually means the printed book alone. Schools publish the new list around the December graduations and classes start in early March, so January and February are when parents compare last year’s books with the new list and a complete set changes hands most easily.

Cover prices on novels and school texts:

a new Spanish-language novel in paperback costs around $15 to $28. A Spanish-language school text runs about $20 to $40 a title, with the imported English courses at bilingual schools above that. The two hold their value in opposite ways. A bestseller read once competes with every other copy readers have finished with, so it goes for a small share of its cover price, while an out-of-print Panamanian title or a complete hardback series can ask more. A textbook in the right edition keeps most of its worth, because the parent’s alternative is paying full price, right up until the school changes editions and the same book is hard to give away.

How a pirated bestseller gives itself away:

the type looks soft, the paper is thin and greyish, the cover colours are a shade off and the trim is uneven. Start with the copyright page: no ISBN, no publisher’s details or a printing date that does not fit the edition are all bad signs. Beyond fakes, open any paperback flat in the middle, because a spine that cracks there is about to shed pages. Underlining is harmless in a novel and a problem in a text a child has to fill in. Brown spotting along the page edges or a musty smell means mould, which spreads to the books beside it, so leave those behind.

The copyright page in a book listing:

photograph it with the cover and the spine, because it answers the questions a buyer would otherwise send one by one: title, author, publisher, edition, ISBN and, for a translation, the translator. Say whether it is the English original or a Spanish edition. For school texts, give the grade and the school, say whether the workbook is blank and whether the digital code has been used, and list the whole set as soon as the school year ends rather than waiting for February. Novels move faster bundled by author or series, while a collectable copy deserves a listing of its own. A parent holding the new list will check it against your photos line by line, so a set with the edition visible on every spine goes before one described simply as complete.