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How to Heartlessly Arbitrage Used Books With a PDA
Pickens writes "Michael Savitz writes at Salon how he makes a living armed with a laser bar-code scanner fitted to a Dell PDA. Savitz haunts thrift stores and library book sales to scan hundreds of used books a day and instantly identify those that will get a good price on Amazon Marketplace. 'My PDA shows the range of prices that other Amazon sellers are asking for the book in question,' writes Savitz. 'Those listings offer me guidance on what price to set when I post the book myself and how much I'm likely to earn when the sale goes through.' Savitz writes that on average, only one book in 30 will have a resale value that makes it a "BUY" but that he goes through enough books to average about 30 books sold per day. 'If I can tell from a book's Amazon sales rank that I'll be able to sell it in one day, I might accept a projected profit of as little as a dollar. The more difficult a book will be to sell, the more money the sale needs to promise.' Savitz writes that people scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops and that libraries are beginning to advertise that no electronic devices are allowed at their sales. 'If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?' concludes Savitz."
Supply and demand. Now if he was scanning them and making torrents, that would be shameless.
Sure, you can go through all those second-hand bookstores and strip them of anything will make a profit. It makes the store less interesting for the rest of us, who actually want to read the books we find. I like the search, which may turn up a treasure I recognise, or may turn up something obscure that I, but virtually nobody else, want to read. To put it another way, it's why Firefly was canned. Lots of us thought it was good, but not enough to turn a quick profit. There's a lot of instant-hit cheap crap on TV. Please don't do this to bookstores as well.
Shouldn't that be - make it a "BUY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Because he's not really adding value, only a markup for selling in a different place. Whether that's of use to anyone (by making it available where it will be appreciated more) is debateable, and it may be of some worth, but I would say he is indeed more profiteering than adding value.
Savitz writes that people scanning books sometimes get kicked out of thrift stores and retail shops and that libraries are beginning to advertise that no electronic devices are allowed at their sales. 'If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?' concludes Savitz."
Perhaps the people running these sales want them to have more of a community feel, and either anticipate or know from past experience that allowing professional sellers to come in and take on-the-spot digital assessments of books will disrupt the existing selling environment.
Here are some potential motivations for the ban that I can think up off the top of my head:
coding is life
People buy books at thrift stores and library sales because they love books. People donate books to libraries because they want to share their love of books. If this becomes any popular, it will drive the price up for one thing; it will take the books from people who might pick one up because it's cheap, and love it, and put it in the hands of people who are trying to make a profit from it. Because as with everything, it takes something that people do for love of knowledge, art, or craft, and pollute it with people who don't care for it at all, just for the money it represents. That is why you feel shame doing it. Not to mention that if this becomes really profitable, how long until publishers, editors and authors see the "lost profits" and crack down on it like they are doing with music and movies? Once again, thank you for ruining it for the rest of us for the sake of your short term greed.
> then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?
Part of the joy of used book sales is discovering treasures. By automating this task, it allows the fellow to empty stores of these treasures. He is depriving hundreds of people of a little joy that would make their day ("Wow, I found a $5 book for $.50!") in order to actually make a living (which probably becomes a lot less pleasurable and a lot more work-a-day after a short while).
So, he feels shame because subconsciously he knows he's depriving the world of many moments of happiness!
[Note for the picky, yes, "treasures" don't 100% correlate with price differences, but you get the idea :-)]
" 'If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?' concludes Savitz."
Because it makes you a bottom-feeder. And no one likes bottom-feeders. You're taking the generosity and good will of others who are trying to help the less fortunate and turning it into your own personal profit machine. What, has the "stealing candy from babies and reselling it online" market dried up so quickly? This is right up there with people that go around to thrift stores buying up all the decent items and reselling them for 10-100x more in their "antique" stores, leaving nothing but crap for those that are in need. Sorry dude, but you're a scum-sucking lowlife.
Indeed, by doing this you are probably saving untold energy by preventing people from having to search for books.
All the buggy-whip manufacturers bitching about how this will change the used book landscape have missed the point entirely. There will time when books will go away completely, and this is only an interim step. In a hundred years of technological progress don't you think that hardcopy books are going to be a specialty, boutique item?
Let the buggy-whip manufacturers die. Accept that buying used books via Amazon is easier and indeed better for everyone than driving from store to store. Sure, book browsing will be deprecated. But then, ALL retail outlets will eventually go away except for boutiques and big box stores. There's really no need for anything in-between and such a business will always be less efficient than one which has no physical presence. The only thing that depends on physical presence is impulse buying, where you get someone in your store and sell them crap they don't need.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not entirely sure if I have a major problem with what he's doing here, but let's put things into perspective.
Most used booksellers and employees work where they do because they love books and the joy that reading gives them and others (through suggestions etc). Now this guy comes along and strips all of that out and does what he does purely for the goal of making a profit. Sure, I could see how booksellers, library sale volunteers, etc would be pissed off with him, and I honestly can't blame them for that. He's intruding on their community just to make a buck. Yes, he's allowed to, but it's annoying to see it happen.
To put it another way, the OSS community thrives specifically because volunteers and enthusiasts enjoy working on the problem and creating something. Yet many of them get pissed off when companies come along purely to profit off of their works, even if they do play by the ground rules that have been set up (following licenses, etc). A lot of it is because they're not contributing in any way to the community that has been created. Hell, they've gone so far as to change the rules because they didn't like how people were following them (see GPLv3 and TiVo). So how is what this guy is doing really any different?
I can't see anything at all wrong with this. This is a classic business connecting a group of buyers and sellers who wouldn't have otherwise been connected. The sellers get their book sale and the buyers get their book at a reasonable price. Everyone wins. No different from any other shop that buys at factory price and sells at retail price.
you're not a freemason? your prospects are limited/none out here in the 'new' baal driven war, of the world's worst, against ALL the rest of US. there is one thing you can do to improve your slim/no chances. it's a little complicated but not difficult (like fairytail meets fantasy presented as reality)......, & you get to promote it.
uhm do you realize that right now, as you read this, there are extremely rich people who are arbitraging when old and sick people will die? and these arbitragers are at the highest levels of civic authority, on the boards of charities, and running agencies in the government?
its called 'life settlements' and 'longevity swaps' and,, unlike you guys who 'arbitrage' used books for 2 dollars, they have no qualms about it, in fact they will scream at you very lustily about how they are 'doing gods work' and their 'services' are a vital part of society and the foundation of capitalism (and thus freedom).
its kind of sad to think people are worried about this, and that people want to ban it, while the real arbitrages,,,, arbitraging environmental and human rights law by moving production to China for example,,,, run rampant and are taking over the planet.
and every year there are fewer and fewer regulations on it.
Apart from anything else, they are in the ideal position to do this - since they could scan the books at their leisure before pitting them on sale. if I gave books to a charity shop, I'd like to feel that they were getting the most benefit from my gifts - and if that entails checking their value before slapping a generic $2 price tag on each one, so be it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Why does this guy even bother. If 1 in 30 he can make a markup on, how much can this guy be making? $20-50 per day, if he's lucky. He probably spends all day doing it and probably makes $5k per year if he's lucky.
Does anybody not see irony in this? Amazon originally started off as an online retailer/clearinghouse helping people purchase hard to find books through affiliated second hand book sellers.
Playing devil's advocate, is it really so bad though? initial "bottom feeder" reaction aside, the thrift store/used book seller makes a sale and presumably makes a little profit, scanner guy posts a listing, makes a sale and some profit, book buyer gets a book they're after. Scanner guy just becomes a middle man, the same way Amazon started off.
That said, I'll stick with my initial bottom feeder reaction and agree with what backwardmechanic said.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Why aren't the books doing this themselves?
The reason's simple. These retailers make a profit by offering the opportunity to find a precious gem in amongst a ton of crap books. If someone takes all the gems, the viability of the stores diminish. If the stores did this themselves, no one would come to the physical store, and they'd make a pittance selling the few worthwhile books.
So the underlying problem is that the stores are unsustainable, and the guy with the scanner exacerbates the problem.
I'm afraid the second hand book trade is dying for all the wrong reasons. You simply can't build a long term bookselling system on greed and hoarding. By now all books should be freely available online in a searchable format and unencumbered by DRM (but not necessarily free to access). But again there are problems with that because too many people would just take the books (in fact that's already happening).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
How is this "heartless" - as previously stated, people are purchasing books at a price that the seller has deemed fair and are moving them to another market where they have identified the potential to make a profit. Since when did it become taboo to make a fair profit? If they're willing to search out the books and put forth the effort then they're certainly entitled to reaping benefit for their efforts. It's called work. I find the concept inspiring; here's someone who identified an opportunity and is using it to earn money without taking advantage of anyone.
If I donate to the library for their sale it is for several reasons. 1) Recycling the books 2) Providing the library a source of revenue 3) Hoping that someone else will derive enjoyment from something that I have previously possessed. If there's a 2a) inserted by a third party it has not diminished any of the reasons I had and actually adds an additional benefit. All of the statements about the outlets using technology to maximize their profits are well taken, but there are explicit and implicit costs to the application of this technology and the cost/benefit may not merit the effort as compared to pricing them by an algorithm.
Former Inmate, VA Linux Sanitarium
Then there are books like Experimental Methods in RF Design that are selling for a huge amount of money used because, I think, Amazon has the new one listed misspelled.
The used book market can be really weird.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
...please do some background reading into basic economics and it's history. For any layman I highly recommend 'The Ascent of Money' by Niall Ferguson, a really well researched and interesting read.
As many other posters have pointed out, this is the essence of economics - taking a product from one market and moving it to another, more profitable one. You want to buy for as cheap as you can, and sell for as much as you can. Manufacturing in China, and selling in the West, for example...
It's shameful because it's kind of like collecting aluminum cans from public garbage. If you're willing to give your time for that little money, you have a lame existence.
Had to switch from Chrome to Firefox because for some crazy reason the Cut&Paste won't work.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
A completely free market works best when there is no information asymmetry between the parties involved in a transaction. If the buyer knows exactly what the seller knows and vice versa. Scanning books like this creates information asymmetry by giving information to the buyer that is unavailable* to the seller. The seller corrects this by placing limits on the marketplace in order to maintain as good an information balance as possible.
This is exactly how textbook capitalism is supposed to work. Of course, it's ideal if the party placing limits on the marketplace is not a party involved in the transaction in order to avoid bias towards one side or another. That's how governments become involved in regulating the market. Of course, in practice, there are a lot more variables that have an effect on information symmetry and party bias. But something as simple as this is easily explained by basic free market principles.
* Of course, the information is available to the seller, but it's just that the seller is unwilling to procure that information for one reason or another. The seller finds that correcting the information balance by limiting information access to the buyer is easier than correcting it by having to access that information themselves.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20101016/sc_livescience/deepthoughtsonwhatmakeshumansspecial
the article does say we act like monkeys. what's the other 2%? lizard, alien, mindless bot?
I don't understand the objection to this. If a library puts a book out to be sold, why would it be happier to sell the book to one person than to another? Just because someone doesn't use a scanner to determine whether or not to buy a book, doesn't mean that he wants the book for the "right" reasons. So what if the purchaser may make money reselling the book later? If the original seller wanted, he could offer the book at that higher price himself. The fact is, he's satisified receiving the lower amount, except in cases where the buyer scans the book. This is envy, pure and simple. You get the feeling that the objecting sellers would be happier if the buyer was planning on burning the book, or using it to plan or commit a crime, than simply reselling it at a profit. Geesh.
Greg Raven
As long as there's any left, I'll take mine first.
If there's one thing a lot of you should learn about economics, it's that an economy is meant to be practiced, not analyzed. Everywhere were there's profit, there will be an explanation thinkable that will blame someone for unethical behavior. If you want to be succesful in a market economy, it's best to just go ahead and exploit opportunities. All this blame (out of jealousy?) will get you nowhere.
It's Slate, btw, not Salon. And what seems shameful, at least to me, is that it completely debases one of the main purposes of thrift stores, library sales and yard sales, and that is community need. Yeah, there's some money-making, but most libraries aren't actually expecting to make much real money on a booksale -- they're there to build goodwill and community. They still depend on donors, grants and tax money for operations. In fact, Libraries are much more social than commercial institutions. Same with yard sales -- it's a community event, and a way to clear out your basement and/or garage a little, but when it becomes a way to make money, it starts to feel creepy. Thrift stores too hardly ever try to make full profit on what they sell -- they're raising money, often for the poor, and trying to help out the poor by underselling donated goods.
By coming along and skimming that community-building profit margin off, what Savitz is doing is saying that the community means less to him than the profit he can glean from it. It's a fundamentally ruthless position and, while not at all illegal, it's certainly shameful.
If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?
If it's possible to make a decent living giving unjustified loans/selling alcohol or drugs/etc. to people who're already down, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?
Seriously, you're being a leech, a bottom feeder, and you're right in feeling ashamed. Actually, that feeling speaks for you - there's hope for you yet, maybe.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
This may come as a shock, but the summary isn't *gasp* fully accurate. Scanners are allowed at the library sale they say forbids it. It's actually rather interesting-- the early "member's only" hour forbids scanners, then they let scanners in during the open sale hours. So it's a nice compromise between "let people browse" and "let the book sellers make a profit", they're just giving first crack to readers, then a fair shake to sellers afterwards. Neat compromise, that.
A.
Maybe the question we individually should ask is, if I was at these bookstore sales, how would I feel knowing I was denied* the opportunity to get these books at the "fair profit" price and instead had to pay the markup from these other middlemen?
*And let's be honest here, while it's not an absolute denial, the laser armed reseller has an overwhelming (especially in numbers) advantage to most both in equipment and experience.
To drive my point home just imaging shopping for groceries and finding all the good stuff has been picked away to be sold at a higher price elsewhere? Maybe we all will have a better shopping experience if we turn it into a competitive sport?
Just think the Library is to damn stupid to scan and sell the books themselves.
Face palm.
Although employment generally is very similar to prostitution, one way or another, we like to hide that sad fact from ourselves. Finding a book to resell is probably dredging up feelings rather like a wino going through trash to collect aluminum cans. It should not dredge up those feelings but the fact that you are doing your scavenging in view of others is bothering you. Actually you provide a great service to people but then again so do buzzards.
He feels bad for precisely the same reason that a man who pulls up to a soup kitchen in a Mercedes and casually takes a seat should feel bad. Thrift shops are understood to be charitable organisations, facilitating the spread of unwanted items to the needy for prices consistently lower than the normal free market. They are often run by volunteers who wouldn't know a thing about setting up an online presence. Buying an item or two won't hurt their stocks much, but to comb through their merchandise every day removing the most valuable items is stealing directly from the pockets of those who donated the items in the first place.
I've petitioned our local libraries to get scanners and scan donated books but they have stubbornly refused, claiming it is easier/cheaper to have periodic "sales" (where arbitrageurs with PDAs show up, scan off the cream and leave the cruft).
Libraries are losing millions they could easily capture - this will force them to move into the 21st century.
So are you all actually arguing for higher prices then? Middlemen aren't free and asking the market to rise to their level means higher prices overall.
Two things:
Someone will make up a better way and sell it to the bigger book stores and thrift stores. The will relegate this to a smaller and smaller pool, as competition (thanks to articles like this) heats up for the dwindling supply of non-internet-enabled stores.
Second: the pay sucks. This guy, who admits that you can make up to $1000 a week (more if you employ your family/other people) spends 80 hours doing all the work, including listing, selling, and mailing.
Okay...so he's grossing $12.50 hr, on average. Great. When the economy picks up and he can get a "real" job paying him twice that, this option will probably go away. Presuming he's not ADHD or otherwise impaired, anyone with this kind of organizational skill is probably going to be gold for somebody who can pay him $45-60k/yr plus benefits. For 40-50 hours a week of work. He'll get his life back (presuming he ever had one), and get better pay and benefits.
This is the depression era trashpicker. They will always exist, but it's mostly a fad that rears its head in bad times. The only twist to it is that the internet has made the trashpickers job "clean".
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm an academic librarian, and we have an annual book sale. Last year, a vendor came in and bought up every textbook we had. We discussed later how to deal with vendors. The conversation brought out some valid points:
The book sale is as much (if not more) about serving our community--and our community doesn't include the internet at large. Our primary concern are our students, faculty, and staff. The goodwill generated by the book sale is as important to us as the money. That being said, the textbooks purchased, by and large, were either older editions or titles not used on our campus. We always have a large portion of the books left over at the end of the week, and they're shipped off to literacy centers or libraries in Africa.
In the end, more than a quarter of our sales last year came from that one vendor. This year, we emailed them letting them know the date. A sale is a sale, and a bookseller buying to put on Amazon does add value. We dont' have the time or the staff to maximize sales, but the vendor does, and if our students don't want a book, maybe someone across the country does. One of the most important tenets of librarianship is the idea that a book that doesn't get open has no value to anyone. The problem is that books are romanticized (and this from a librarian!) and often represent more emotional value than anything else. People object to looking at books as a way to make some money rather than something to cherish on the shelf (and perhaps never actually read). One gets over that quickly when the library's out of space and 5000 barely-used volumes need to be ditched to make space for new purchases.
Use of the word arbitrage implies that the transaction is risk-free for the arbitrageur. This guy is just buying low and selling high.
That is not arbitrage, since he is taking delivery of the books, holding them, shipping them. Plus he has to pay for them (negative cash flow at a temporal state) without a simultaneous positive cash flow from selling the same good at the same temporal state. Real arbitrage opportunities are rare and fleeting. For this to be arbitrage, he would have to sell each book on Amazon the moment he bought them, deliver the book instantly, and receive his payment instantly.
If a local used bookstore is trying to maintain their "unique" character, they might want to have a lot of hidden gems among the rest of the merchandise. Most of their real customers (the ones generating profit for the store) buy lots of different books on a regular basis. Perhaps having some priced extra low adds to the thrill of the chase for those customers. The same thing is true for those library sales. From the library's perspective, the usual customers they are trying to attract are going to buy several books, at wildly different price points and margins. The library is probably trying to balance four variables: get rid of as many books as possible, making as much money as possible, in as short a time as possible, without any of the citizens who support the library feeling ripped off because they just sold the books wholesale.
So, just like the supermarket can say "milk on sale; limit 2" to lure the regular customers without giving away too much to people coming into the store just to buy milk, so too is the used bookstore or library justified in banning the scanner.
Because it makes you a bottom-feeder. And no one likes bottom-feeders.
Millions of SpongeBob SquarePants fans are "no one".
FTA: 'If it's possible to make a decent living selling books online, then why does it feel so shameful to do this work?' concludes Savitz."
Because thrift store and libraries do not exist simply to collect, store, and present the books to be used for purely commercial purposes. After all, the library and thrift store could easily do the same thing to make money. There is professional licensing for such arbitrageurs – for example auctioneers, who pays licensing fees, etc. These sales are not there to enrich you. They are there to find a good home for donated books, to provide work opportunities for people that might not otherwise have them, and to survive as organizations doing work for the public good.
Savitz's regular use of this resource to supply his commercial enterprise is unethical and is probably illegal. Is he registered in his state as a profit-making enterprise? Does he collect appropriate sales taxes on his sales? Does he compensate the library and thrift store for their labor? Does he report this income on his IRS-1040?
If my donations to Goodwill were destined only to line someone's pockets, I would quit donating used articles and instead destroy and discard them.
Potential customer detected - eject him from the store, before he can has a chance to buy the products we have on offer at the price we decided to sell it at! Move, move, move!
Are these store owners fucking mental? Why not just hide all the books in a sack, demand the money up front, then hand one over at random? It makes about as much sense.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I work for a company that is in the used book business. I meet with the people who run the local thrift stores, and the local friends-of-the-library sales. They are very open about why they don't welcome these people to their sales/stores.
The reason people with scanners are not welcome is because they are disruptive and rude to other patrons. Typically these people show up and are waiting when the doors open, they come in and lay claim to an entire section of shelves, or display table and begin sorting into piles by price-point. They stay for hours, and systematically move through the entire inventory. They take up a lot of space, prevent other customers from accessing the merchandise and leave a big mess behind for the staff to clean up.
The reason they don't scan the books and sell them online themselves is because they don't have the staff to do it. It is a great business as a sideline, easy to do, low overhead, moderate profitability. It is an enormous amount of work to do on a larger scale. Many of the chain thrift shops are expanding into online sales, but the smaller ones do not have the resources. Library sales are typically staffed by volunteers with one or two actual employees overseeing the process -they don't have the staff to do more.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
the difference between what valuable things a book might tell you, and the price it might bring. Ruthlessly picking the cherries deprives used book stores of the bulk of their income and leaves them with a large mass of unsellable paper. If enough people do that, that's going to make second hand bookselling as a whole much less viable and might affect future availability of used books that aren't (then-)currently in vogue.
Now that you're on that gravy train anyway, why don't you come up with something good next to the bad and figure out how to do second hand bookselling as a whole in a better way? Like, maybe, figure out ways to monetise the less popular books too?
Supply and demand is fine. These people are greasing up the wheels of commerce. The real question is why aren't bookstores doing this?
You just described everyone except the places that mint pennies.
Monopolizes? Please clarify, is he preventing other people from also buying books in the book stores? Or is he preventing people from going to other bookstores?
Actually, he's filling a demand by increasing the flow of supply. If anything, the more books brought to the global market, the less they cost. If books that are in demand, collecting dust on a shelf, that contributes nothing to the economy.
Seriously, anyone in the book business that can't be bothered to check on the value of their inventory deserves to have their ... what was happening again? .... oh yeah, deserves to have their books bought. What?
1. Open a book store
2. Have a customer scan your books
3. Have them give you money for some of the books
4. Profit.
Why does this guy even bother. If 1 in 30 he can make a markup on, how much can this guy be making? $20-50 per day, if he's lucky. He probably spends all day doing it and probably makes $5k per year if he's lucky.
$50 x 5 x 50 = $12,500. Granted, I'm not subtracting cost of internet service, equipment, gas to drive around to these places (or subway fare if you live in the city), etc.
Please help metamoderate.
I've been going to book sales all my life, and they used to be fun. After enough bad experiences with these losers, I no longer go. When you show up at a book sale before the doors open, and there's already a whole line of PDA toting shiestas, you know you're not going to enjoy yourself. There's too many of them to avoid them. Normal customers stand side-by-side looking through the shelves/tables giving each other space. These people will grab books right in front of you with only a 1/30 chance they'll buy it. I've had books I'd definitely buy snatched from right where I was looking on the shelf. It's pure rudeness.
For the most part, the people donating the books are the typical patrons showing up at the book sale. When you piss them off, you ruin the whole system of fund raising. The average person buys a used book because it interests them, and not because it can be sold at a profit. They're the ones buying the books with no resale profit. Once the scum like Michael Savitz are done picking through the books, the seller (typically a library) is left with 29 out of 30 books, and a lot fewer customers. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with rudeness.
There could also be other aspects of the sale that are damaged by people scanning.
The sale could be a loss leader for the organization, a way to get book buyers down to see the library. (or stop by the charity shop)
The mixture of books could be part of the entertainment value of the sale, with a few gold nuggets mix into a lot of sand, it is the searching and looking, and reading a bit that is part of the fun.
Having someone scan and remove all the gems is not going to get the buyer and therefore the seller what they are looking for.
Maybe this person should offer to scan and price books for a fee. He I suspect he could make more money in the same time, and have the library staff help help him do it.
I process the donations for the local library's book sale. We get those people who give us stuff that's fairly new (eg, their last year of reading material), but we also get days when someone drops off 10-20 boxes of books overnight ... some of it's so old there's no bar code, so I'd have to type in every last item.
And it's not just the title that's important for the descriptor -- was it a signed copy? Was it a first printing? Is it the large print version?
I was told that years ago, there was someone who'd go through the work of selling the stuff on e-bay or amazon, and it might be worth it, *if* I had a scanner like this, but there's no way in hell and I'm going to type in the name of every book. And that'd still leave me maybe 1/4 of the pile, as many of the donations pre-date bar codes. (but well, a 1920s printing of Othello, in good condition? maybe it has value ... I don't know)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I've seen some books on e.g. Bookfinder for say $300, which are actually worth $10. Some crazy guy speculatively prices a copy at $250, when none are for sale. A few more appear for sale, and base their prices on that, so we get a load of books on offer with values in the range $250-$300, say. But actually, no purchaser may be prepared to pay more than $10 for it. So if you buy a copy for $50, and hope to sell for $250, you are going to lose big time.
You do realize that what doesn't sell at these sales gets thrown out, and not always recycled or anything? I did community service at a small thrift store in 2003. They had a giant pile of books that had been marked "unsold-destroy". In this were a ton of auto repair manuals. I'm a car nut. I asked, they agreed, I cherry-picked fifteen decent repair manuals and an issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine. The 12 car repair manuals sold for $107 on eBay. I kept and still have and use the other three. The autumn '96 issue of Cigar Aficionado went for $20 all by itself (Demi Moore on the cover). According to some of you, I should have let those things clog up a landfill somewhere. That $127 paid my electric bill that month and kept me out of the dark. Flame me if you must, but don't be surprised if I don't care what you think.
Those who know, do not say. Those who say, do not know.
Why don't we burn all of these silly "printed" books and read our ebooks on our iKindleDroid PreBerry 7 Pad?
I look forward to the day when we have a universal online e-library where you can read any book ever published. For free. This copyright crap can't last forever. But as a backup plan, let's plan special spy-assassin training for our great-grandchildren.
More often than not the books for sale at the thrift store were donated, which means when they sell the store makes 100% profit (minus overhead). In my experience, however, some thrift store owners like to look at themselves as better than others because they are operating a "charitable" organization, more often than not with a religious organization backing (and providing tax shelter) the thrift store. These institutions claim to be helping the poor and the needy, when in fact they charge the "poor and needy" customers the same price as anyone else who shops there.
If they determine the customer is shopping with the intention to resell, they typically react negatively. I have been banned from shopping from a local thrift store for no other reason than the owner had learned that I had resold items on eBay. From the owner's point of view I had taken away opportunities for less fortunate people to purchase these same items. Here are some additional details, however.
I had already learned from employees at this thrift store that they frequently received more items than the building could contain. Each week, they gathered up items in the store that had not sold (I believe the items had about a four week period before they were gathered up). If they were glass, they were smashed. If they were clothing items they were bagged and prepped to be shipped off to a company that shreds unwanted fabric and packs it into insulation used in the manufacture of automobiles. I presume the glass was sent out for recycling. From what I gather, the company that made insulation paid the thrift store for the fabric and covered all shipping costs.
My point is - if we were denying the poor the benefit of obtaining these items, they were being replaced each week in such volume that would result in a significant amount of the items being destroyed/recycled/sold to a third party. So the reality was that there was more than enough to go around.
Another point of view is that we were taking advantage of the thrift store by reselling their product for a higher price than what we paid. I fail to see how this is a problem. What anyone who does this is doing is work. It takes time to sort through items in any resale environment and determine which are valuable and which are not. Any thrift store owner or employee knows this. It also takes time to take those items into a different forum. For example - to list an item on eBay it is typically necessary to provide detailed photographs of the item in question, create a listing and respond to questions about the item. Upon the completion of the sale it takes time to properly package and ship the item. So in effect, it is not that the item itself is being sold for a higher price, it is that the resellers are being compensated for their time, which is, in effect, a service.
My final point is that when the owner of a thrift store, yard/garage sale, or library gets offended that someone is reselling their items, it is hypocrisy. These individuals who are offended are already engaging in resale. Of the three, the thrift store owner is the most guilty because in most cases he or she is reselling product that was given to them freely as a donation. Unless the thrift store is being operated as not-for-profit and all proceeds are being donated to charity, they are usually making excellent money from a small business owner's perspective. In our current economy, thrift stores are one of the few business models that are doing rather well. Therefore when these individuals become upset with or feel threatened by resellers who purchase their product, it is ultimately a problem of greed - they do not like the idea that someone else will sell an item for more than they (the thrift store owner) was able to sell it. I have a simple answer for these people - try reselling these items on eBay or Amazon. Hire the staff to do it if you do not have the time to do it yourself. I predict, however, that the profit margin will not be as large when compared to the overhead of hiring people to do this and the amount of time necessary to invest in order for it to be successful.
If the above offends, perhaps capitalism is not your bag, baby.