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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:
coding is life
" '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.
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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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.
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.
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> 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.
Easier than having access? The only ease of access that PDA guy has in his favor is the laser barcode scanner; which saves him all of five seconds of typing the UPC into a search engine. We're not talking about information asymmetry here. We're talking about a guy who's willing to put in a modicum of effort vs. the sheer laziness of others.
I comparison shop with my iPhone all the time. And the closest thing to flack I've ever gotten from a brick and mortar store is a polite request to let them try to match the offer if I find a better price online. Informed consumers via always-on portable internet access are a fact of life in this day and age. Businesses need to adapt or die.
Imagine all the people...
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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