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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."
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.
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:
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" '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.'"
Library books were purchased by the state. The sales are designed as a way that people without much money can buy books to encourage reading.
Thrift stores are often charities, designed for pretty much the same purpose. Neither is set up so some douchebag can make a profit off of them.
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.
As someone for whom the web is the only place I can find such "treasures" in their original language (I'm not from an English speaking country), stopping him from doing what he's doing deprives me from actually reading the books.
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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).
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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.
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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.
There's nothing wrong with wearing a suit either. A lot of the worlds rich and successful wear suits .... yet "suit" is an insult in some circles.
He feels dirty for doing this and maybe there's a reason.
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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.
I agree. I've been at garage sales where people with these scanners show up. They're going to have to do some work to earn that profit that I wasn't willing to do (and knew about at the time). I only wish more of them would bargain with me. If a guy with the PDA came to me and said the price was too high, I'd ask him what he'd want to give me.....recognizing that he wants some level of profit margin. At my last garage sale, I was sold some stuff for $10 that a guy felt he could get more for on Craigslist.....I helped him load it into his car. Had I wanted to go through the effort to sell it on Craigslist, I would have. And for the record, these were "neighborhood garage sales" so I didn't do anything other than drag the crap to my driveway and wait for people to show up.....it's all about minimal effort for me.
So, if the library/thrift store/whatever wants to put forth the effort, they'll get the reward. If they just want to move it, these guys with scanners will be able to make their own profit.
At our local library sale, these people sweep in as soon as the sale opens, snatching up anything that has resale value. For computer books that means anything written recently relating to popular topics. The same thing happens in many other sections and genres. For those of us who work nearby but can't get to the sale until lunch, it means anything we might be interested in will be long gone. As a result, we no longer even bother going. The library may have sold the 150 books bought by these entrepreneurs, but how many others did they fail to sell because people didn't come and browse?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Basically he is making it harder and more expensive to acquire books and thus education
He might be making it more expensive for the 100-1000 or so people that were going to attend the local library sale, but he then increases supply to the Amazon Marketplace, which will reduce the price for the millions who shop on Amazon.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Except that at least in the library sale case the student had the opportunity to read the book for free while it was in circulation or to read one of the thousands of other books in the library. If the students is on a"$7/hr work study" he has access to a college library and while not necessarily that particular book, certainly books on the same topic (at least for nonfiction). The demographic where this could make a difference is for poor children/workers. Regardless, public libraries themselves are probably the better option than the sales for the poor. As to thrift stores, if someone buys the item at the posted price, the thrift store should be happy it made a sale. The charities run them as an income stream, not to necessarily sell to the poor (hint, lots of hipsters hit them up for party/halloween parties.
but rather about giving back to the community (where have I heard that phrase before?)
As to "where", I can't say. As to "when", then I guess the answer is probably not very recently. We seem to vhave allowed ourselves to fall into an ethical hole that informs us that "anything goes" when it comes to making a profit.
If a public library sheds some of its stock which is paid for by the public purse, then that sale is not a legitimate target for plundering by speculators. What is legitimate is for genuine readers prepared to take or make the time to sort through the books to have first grabs at the books for personal enjoyment and/or education,
Yes, it is about giving something back to the community. There are many whose only means of purchasing worthwhile reading material is through such sales, especially if they read a lot. I've been in that boat myself (though nowadays I more often tend to prowl 2nd-hand books online via Amazon, alibris or ABE). Let's not forget that there are still many who don't have access to the internet.
The only problem I have there is wealth disparity is becoming so high that .5% of the population is starting to get *everything* (most of the wealth, most of the income, most of the best books- which sit unused on a shelf looking valuable), most of the best property (which sits unused 300 days a year).
The next 10% is pretty happy. But the bottom 90% is increasingly pissed at this "let them eat cake attitude". The wealthy better reign their greed in a bit and start sharing the wealth (literally) or things are going to turn ugly as they have repeatedly in the past.
As people lose hope, they turn mean.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Some libraries (as in the case of my local library) get many more books donated than they can actually use, and therefore, book sales tend to be weighted more towards books that the library didn't actually buy.
And what about the poor people in other areas?
Don't they count?
He drives the price down on amazon marketplace by increasing the supply.
A handful of people who turn up at the library sale late don't get a chance to buy the books at a low price (though by your logic rich people shouldn't buy from second hand shops or thrift stores at all and instead buy everything new since otherwise they're depriving a poor kid of the chance to buy the same items.) and thousands who search amazon get the chance to buy slightly cheaper than they would have otherwise.
But a small benefit to a huge number of people feels worse than a slightly larger potential benefit to a handful.
A fair portion of the books being sold off probably wouldn't find any buyers and would end up pulped anyway.
I have volunteered at my local library's booksale many times. We know that we can make more money selling online. Many of the books we have available for $1 we already know we could sell to Amazon for $10. We sell our books for $1 because we think people who can't (or even people who won't) buy books for $10 should still be able to own books.
The people who go through the library sales with scanners are basically equivalent to people going to a food-bank, getting food items, then selling them for profit.
Forthermore, they tend to be some of our rudest customers. They grab a book of a shelf, scan it, and move onto the next book, often sorting books into two piles, one pile for the books they want, another (larger) pile for the books they don't. They often do not pick back up the pile they do not want.
There are other booksellers who come in we mind less. They buy all the books for $1 each, and scan them at home, sell the expensive ones and return the ones they do not want to the library for a sale. Yes, they are still preventing others from getting the best of the books for a price, but they are quite willing to "donate" the cost of the books they do not buy.
Our library has had the no electronic devices sign up for three years now, and every year someone tries to sneak one in. They hide them in purses, pockets, anywhere they can. They do not care about other people's rules. They do not care when we explain to them what we are doing that people are able to get good books at low prices. All they care about is their own profits. They truly are scum.
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