Both brand-new books and returns are stored here, and 15,000 new orders are processed each day.

Some of those books sit in a warehouse operated by the distribution company National Book Network, nestled in the Catoctin Mountains in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. NEARY: Greco says no one knows for sure how many returned books are in storage, but it's safe to say there are millions. ALBERT GRECO (Professor, Fordham University): At a certain period of time, the publishing house would decide if this inventory will never move, and then they will physically ship it to a plant that will pulp it. Fordham University professor Albert Greco says publishing and distribution companies have vast warehouses filled with books that have been returned. NEARY: Those books sit in storage while their fate is decided. So now it gets shipped in, gets shipped out, gets shipped in - and if doesn't sell, it gets shipped out again. AVIN DOMNITZ (Chief Operating Officer, American Booksellers Association): Quite often, booksellers will order a book, not sell it, return it and then, some short period of time later, reorder the same book. Well, says, Avin Domnitz, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, some get put back on the shelf, sometimes more than once. What do you do with all those returned books? It's become an entrenched way of doing business, but there's one really big problem with it. So they offered bookstores the right to return unsold books for credit. LYNN NEARY: During the Great Depression, publishers were looking for a way to encourage booksellers to buy more books and to take a chance on unknown authors. That would mean a whole new way of doing business.

Recently, the CEO of Barnes & Noble called returns insane and said it's time to find a way to end them. Your bookstore gets millions of copies of books - 'The Year of Cooking Dangerously' or 'Memoirs of Looking at My Belly Button,' whatever that book may be - but if you do not buy that book, the bookseller has the right to return to the publisher any book that they're unable to sell. The book-publishing industry is built on a practice that many in the business consider costly and inefficient.

Books like unsouled