Let's not equate what he is doing with Berlin in 1939. Even flags get burned when they're ceremonially retired, and there is nothing unpatriotic about it. It's not as though these books are being burned in protest of their content or that the government was saying they have ideas that shouldn't be put forth. Nope, that's actually the FCC's job when it comes to television programming. These books are simply a victim of supply and demand. For example, there is an abundant supply of Clancy in the English-speaking world but the demand for dogeared copy of Cardinal in the Kremlin just isn't all that high. Hence why he can't give them away. And given that he is a businessman trying to SELL books, not STORE books, he needs to manage the cost of his overhead. This doesn't take a Ph.D. in economics to figure out.

I just want to know why he's not recycling them. Burning them wastes the valuable resource of the paper. Recycling them, however, means more new books and new ideas can be generated from the material of the old. That is a model for efficiency and there is something poetic about it at the same time.

If he were prudent, he should, at a minimum, be listing these for a penny at Amazon, but I suspect nobody has shown him how. They'd move much more quickly and gross at least a tiny bit of income while not having to resort to the unpalatable tactic of book-burning.