It used to be relatively simple. You could go to the St James's Street Library and get a book out, or, if feeling in need of a bit of exercise through the obstacle course that is the local market and also feeling lucky enough to brave the hoodies and drunks in the Town Square, you could go to the Central Library. The St James's Street library is now gone, and many of the books have apparently disappeared from the Central Library.

There is a Waterstone's in the Mall, but they are not cheap and treat books a bit like Farmfoods and Sainsbury's flog frozen foods, with abundant 3 for 2 offers but only a veneer of real choice. Books Ink goes some way to alleviating the situation with its classics section, but the general modern fiction isn't too good. Darussalam Bookshop only sells Islamic books.

Scope, at the top of the High Street has the occasional gem, but they do not really stock very much and are sometimes pricey. The British Heart Foundation also have a second hand book area in its store, though I find the store a bit pricey for what are second hand books and also off-putting with its smell, a bit like used to be the case at Crest. That leaves Help the Aged and Oxfam.

Oxfam is currently busy revamping its book offer,with the help of an expert who has overseen the removal of bag after bag load of donated books in a white van, off to be 'recycled', as the destruction of books is called these days. Many had never made it to the shelves. To be fair, this may be because children had scribbled on them, or because they were out of date text books. A lot have gone though because they look what they are -old or second hand- and can't be sold as part of the shiny new pricing structure, which demands that books now cost a minimum of £1.49 each, a trebling from the previous minimum charge in Oxfam. The very best books have been cherry-picked for sale at specialist shops elsewhere away from Walthamstow at suitably high prices or on the internet. Many, especially those in foreign languages have been dumped.

The increased prices, up a minimum of 204% (and many books will be on sale for much more) at a time when inflation is 5.3%, are not welcome, as much as Oxfam may consider itself to be a good cause. The staff involved in the decision making for this exercise are not locals, of course, but have come in from elsewhere to put their stamp on our beloved local Oxfam and bring it into line with what they get up to elsewhere. The local staff will be aware that people do not have a lot of 'Spare Change, Guv', these days, and know that books are cheaper at Crest. They will also be aware that after these price hikes, books will be cheaper at Help the Aged. The attitude from the gung ho outside management is that 'we don't compete with them, they compete with us'. This sounds to me an odd way to run a charity shop (it was outside 'expertise' that drove the British Red Cross Shop to the wall), but an expert is an expert for all that.

This homoginisation of its appraoch to running its shops is interesting. On its website, Oxfam tells us that they have learned that "the best people to help poor communities are community members themselves. That's because no-one understands their problems better than they do. So listening is absolutely vital to finding lasting solutions, and making a project successful. In fact, Oxfam mostly works in partnership with local organisations – supporting initiatives that are their own. People living with poverty have the ideas and the determination. But they're sometimes short on expert guidance."

Of course, Walthamstow isn't the third world, but it would be interesting to know how communities in the third world would take to someone coming in from outside and throwing away their donated books instead of recycling them by selling them at a price they used to be able to afford. Just a thought.