Publisher sometime send books to bookstores with the understanding that stores only pay for the books that are sold. That creates a problem, for example if a bookstore gets 100 books and only sells 60, what to do with the other 40 books?<p>One option is to return the books to the publisher, but that can be an expensive proposition (books are heavy). So another approach is to destroy the books and provide proof that the books were destroyed by ripping out a cover page and then sending the cover pages back to the publisher. This way, the publisher has some confidence that the bookseller isn't lying about how many books it sold while at the same time they are lowering the frictions to the bookseller by not requiring them to pack and ship the unused books back.<p>The fact of the matter is that for many items, production costs are a rather small portion of the retail price. Search costs are far higher -- e.g. finding someone who wants the item and is willing to pay for it is much more expensive than producing the item. The solution to this is not to overproduce lots of goods and airdrop them on the population, the solution ends up being to destroy inventory when the storage/transport costs exceed the expected value from selling the items.<p>If that means people are emotionally disturbed by stuff that is valuable to some people being destroyed, then so be it. A long time ago when my parents said I shouldn't waste food because there were people who were hungry, I replied that they can go ahead and give the food to whatever hungry people they found, but me overeating wouldn't help anyone who was hungry. They ended up throwing the food in the trash. Sometimes reality doesn't conform to our ideals.