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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.
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.
The added value is that customers looking for a specific book can find a second-hand seller online. I sometimes buy 2nd hand scientific books (the kind that costs $200 new) online; no way that I would consider visiting 20 second-hand stores around here for the faint chance that one of them happens to have that book on the shelf.
The smart thrift store owner would scan the books by themselves and increase the price and/or put them online.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
" '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.'"
You don't think there is significant value in him making the books available online where people that want them can find them, then sending the book to the person who wants it?
Taking goods from a place where there is less demand to a place where there is more absolutely adds value - it causes more economic activity to happen which is good for the economy as a whole.
Look at it this way - one of those books, sitting on a shelf in a store is not helping anyone.
This guy buys the book from the store at a price that the store thinks is fair (since they set it), then sells it to someone who wants it at a price that they think is fair (since they choose to buy it).
So, everyone is transacting at a price that they think is fair and everyone is gaining. The store gets cash for their book that was taking up shelf space. The eventual purchaser gets a book that they want. The middle man makes a profit.
Where is the problem?
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.
He is increasing the availability of sought-after books. Many's the time I've wanted to buy a book from ANYWHERE and not managed it for months only to find it years later on a boot sale or second hand shop (as an example, I once had a copy of Geoffrey Trease's "The Black Banner Players" pass through my hands - one of the rarest books in the world - and incidentally apparently one of the crappiest). The book has a lot more value being able to be purchased from anywhere in the world for the price of postage, especially if it is actually sought-after because it's rare, expensive, limited print run, in a country that doesn't normally sell it, etc.
I don't really see the problem with what he's doing. If I had the time / money / inclination, it sounds like a good way to earn money and always has. My ex used to trawl boot-sales (think garage sales or flea markets if you're American) just before they closed. All the stuff the sellers would normally throw away or put back in their attic for another year would be snapped up for a few pounds for huge bags full. Then she'd sort through them, take out anything of good quality (usually things like baby clothes which are ridiculously expensive when new), wash it, iron it, and sell it on eBay for 50p - £1 per item. Nobody was stopped from buying that stuff from the boot sale itself, but the locality of it meant that most of the young, poor mothers in the country couldn't viably buy the item. The extra value wasn't from washing / ironing (that cost money and rarely made much of a difference because stained tended to stay stained) but from the availability of that item to anyone in the UK. Getting an item for 5p isn't a bargain if it would cost you £40 in fuel to pick it up and there was absolutely no guarantee you wouldn't have a wasted journey. But having someone local pick up all the spare items, and offer them for the price of a stamp to the entire country, with full descriptions and photographs, is more than worth £1 or £2. Profit for my ex, profit for the boot sale seller from stuff they would throw away, profit for eBay, ultra cheap baby clothes that are described exactly and the bad stuff already weeded out for every young mother online.
The value is the availability, and the initial search. He adds that value by doing something completely legal that ANYONE with a brain, or a knowledge of their subject, could do. Every boot sale I've ever been to, there is a queue from 6:30am of various local experts and businesses that swoop in, buy all the good stuff and are onto the next boot sale within ten minutes, because they can recognise the valuable items immediately and snap them up for a good price that the seller is happy with. Many admit that they will then go on to sell that item for near-new prices in their shops. Same thing, slightly less "ethical" and slightly more "business" but hell - they make money, the seller makes money, nobody gets hurt and someone else gets what they consider a bargain when they rebuy it from their specialist shop (because that's easier than trawling boot sales in the hope you'll find some item you're after).
At the very least he is reducing the price of books, though in some cases he could be saving a book from sitting on the shelf for years till it is finally recycled. He is adding efficiency to the book market.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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'd assume he wants first edition, not a reissue.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"However, a person who raises prices for truly needed goods during a crisis also ensures that the goods go to the people who have the most critical need (as measured by willingness to pay), yet are still widely despised."
That's because for some bizarre reason, it appears to be the warlords who have the most critical need for every single provision during a crisis. Bizarre, I know, but somehow they are always the ones with the most willingness to pay.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
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.
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
Libraries, in particular, have no experience with having any sort of book catalog system or keeping track of books going in and out or having to look and enter any information about books when they get said books. Also, they have no computer system that could keep track of any of that, and certainly have no 'register' type system where people come up with the books they want and their absence is marked in any central database, and there's no website where people can look any of that that's hooked into the database.
Wait, made a typo. s/no//
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.