Xavier Hegelsen is one of those guys who make you grin and shake your head in wonder. His primary gig is running Better World Books, which he co-founded after graduating from Notre Dame in 2001. BWB takes books that university bookstores and libraries can’t use and resells, donates, or recycles them. The company then donates overhead profits to worldwide literacy organizations like Books for Africa or Room to Read. The company has grown to over 100 employees, donated over 500,000 books, raised over $3 million for literacy organizations and university service clubs, and saved over 8 million pounds of books from landfill. In his spare time, Xavier bikes around town, is writing his first book, and makes his own beer. He was kind enough to sit down with SFist at the Magnolia Brewpub and talk to us for a spell.

Full interview after the jump!

So how did all of this start?
Well, I’d always wanted to do something with a socially conscious business, and I moved to New York in September of 2001 with the idea of waiting tables or programming, and…well, that didn’t work out so well. So I moved back to South Bend and crashed with some friends for $175 per month. It turned out that a campus community center was short on funding, so we came up with the idea of doing a book drive to raise the money – students never have cash, but they can donate books. We did the drive, sold everything online, and ended up grossing nearly $20,000 out of it. We paid our expenses and then gave the rest to the community center, and realized that we had a business right there.

The company started at Notre Dame…why’d you come do San Francisco?
I loved the business, but I was sick of South Bend. We were expanding regionally, so I came here in 2003 to organize book drives in the western region, and I never left. I ended up writing a bunch of inventory software, and now we work out of an office downtown. Our warehouse is still in South Bend, but we handle business development, marketing, and some tech work here.

How does it all work?
We run book drives through student organizations, and we take the books that libraries can’t use. That’s our primary supply. If you donate a book to the library, they used to just dump what they couldn’t sell; we’re working with over 1,000 of them now. We take those books and sell what we can, and donate or recycle the rest…the libraries and organizations get a split of the profits with us, with the percentage depending on the quality of the book sold.

And you guys keep the rest?
No. Wwe have a unique model where we treat our literacy partners like shareholders and split any money 50/50 with them after investing in growth and employee profit sharing. At this point we're growing fast and reinvesting any money we can in the business.

That had to be really hard from the start – dealing with people who didn’t believe that that’s what you were doing with your money.
Yeah. It’s weird. There’s a lot of skepticism when you’re trying to do something good. If you’re out there saying ‘I’m going to make as much money as I possibly can,’ it’s no problem. But if you claim to be doing something good, people are suspicious. But as we’ve grown, we’ve gained credibility. I mean, we’re going to be half of Books for Africa’s budget next year. And that credibility lets us do other things – a little bit ago I saw an article about a woman who had sold her Mercedes to start a medical school in Somaliland. I called her up and asked her if she needed a medical library. We got the books together, and a few weeks later, she had one. It’s fun to be able to do things like that.

It seems like the socially-conscious business thing is gaining momentum, especially here – do you see it growing more?
Absolutely. We were nominated for the Fast Company Social Capitalist Award this year, and there’s lots of competition for the prize. It’s a big trend in business, and I think it should be. You can’t compete with Amazon, say, on selection or price or shipping speed, but if you can get close and have another hook – “this purchase helps out with…” then you can really do well. It kind of parallels the individual world; if you’re a jerk, then word eventually gets around and you have no friends. I’d like to see it happen that if you’re a corporate jerk, your behavior will eventually get back to you.

And not just on the level of spilling oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon…
Exactly. The Internet has made it much easier to be an informed consumer. Hopefully, if you do good things, people will find out about it and make it part of their decisions.

What’s your book selection like?
We carry about 600,000 titles at any one time, and around two million total books – if you like paperbacks or kids’ books, we’re about the best deal out there. We get everything, though – one time we got a book from an East Coast library that was from 1577.

Do you still have it?
Of course not! We sold it for around $500.

What happens next?
We’re vacating our downtown offices, and I think I’d like to try to open a storefront somewhere like the Inner Sunset. You can only learn so much from a website, and it’d be cool to work somewhere like a retail space, where people could actually come in and talk to us. We’re also getting into publishing – the first book we’re doing is called Jazzocracy, coming out in October. And I’m writing something, basically a how-to for campus activists on how to make their campus more sustainable, environmentally friendly - kind of an activist cookbook. It should come out early next year.

Do you sleep?
I used to not, but I’ve mellowed out.

Last thing – you guys have pioneered the concept of carbon-neutral shipping. How does that work?
It’s pretty neat; we found a professor at Carnegie Mellon who figured out a formula for the carbon footprint of shipping a book. So we programmed that into our shopping cart, and round that figure up. It ends up being an extra two to five cents per book, and we put that towards carbon offsets. We’ve also made that carbon-neutral shopping cart available to any commerce site that would like to use it.

Do you guys do anything evil? I mean, you don’t own a car…
We try. I do own a Piaggo scooter, though. I ‘ve had a thing for scooters since I biked from Norway to southern Italy a few years back.

We’re tired now. Let’s talk about what you’re drinking. Are you a beer guy?
Yep. I’m friends with the guys down at San Francisco Brewcraft; I helped them put together their website, and they’ve been teaching me home brewing. My second batch of homebrew is going to be bottled soon, and we’re going to use it for Octoberfest.