$1000 a week? That's it? Yes, I know that you can make a decent living on that (in the Midwest)... but for what? Would you truly be happy doing that? It just seems like a lot of busy work with little long-term return. Most software devs make much more than that. I guess I'm not really keen on the idea of trading hours for dollars. To each their own I guess.
Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#12This kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Ninth Gate, a rather under-appreciated Johnny Depp movie from about 10 years ago.
Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#13This seems like kind of a weird arbitrage opportunity. Why don't bookshop owners use the exact same setup to price books when they buy them in the first place?
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#14For ages I have dreamed about a service where shoppers could visit flea markets and do an immediate auction if they find something of value. There would be a live stream of "interesting" items on the site, and anybody who wants to buy could immediately connect to the shopper to make him buy the item.
I guess there were too many problems with this model, and I didn't expect high interest (I was more in love with it from a tech angle, doing stuff with phones...). But I just realized that this book scanning business is actually a viable subset of that idea. If image recognition was better, it could also work for other items besides books. (Perhaps image recognition technology is actually good enough by now).
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#15I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be, and head out.
My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed. Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices at these sales.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#16This seems like kind of a weird arbitrage opportunity. Why don't bookshop owners use the exact same setup to price books when they buy them in the first place?
Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers isn't really to invest $1000s in high tech to make a little more money.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#17This year at the Phoenix Book Fair (http://www.vnsabooksale.org/) there was an incident where 2 people who were in line when the doors opened got into a fight. Apparently both men had scanners and shopping carts and were scanning books for the same reason listed in the article. One of the men began reaching into the other's basket to scan his items and that is when the fight began. I think they were just grabbing handfuls of books and putting them in their basket and then starting to scan to see what to keep.
I spoke with one of the organizers and she told me that she goes and sorts books twice a week at their warehouse. It is all volunteer work ... but it got me thinking that you could earn extra income by bringing a scanner. Although in this case it might be better to just alert the charity running the book sale of the item's value.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#18Semi-related: a few days ago I took two boxes of old computer and math books to a local Half-Price Book store. They don't usually offer a whole lot of money for such things, and I had been thinking of donating the books to the public library, but the library didn't seem interested in what I had. I figured I might as well get a few dollars rather than just throw them out.
As expected, after about ten minutes of sorting through what I had brought in, they offered me $13.50 for both boxes, which I gladly accepted. (My goal was clutter reduction, not profit.) A few hours later, they called me on the phone and said that they discovered one of the books I brought was more valuable than they first thought, and wanted to give me an extra $9.50.
I found that refreshingly honest of them.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#19This seems like kind of a weird arbitrage opportunity. Why don't bookshop owners use the exact same setup to price books when they buy them in the first place?
Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers isn't really to invest $1000s in…
The library should give the scanners to the old ladies, then.
Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
#20$1000 a week? That's it? Yes, I know that you can make a decent living on that (in the Midwest)... but for what? Would you truly be happy doing that? It just seems like a lot of busy work with little long-term return. Most software devs make much more than that. I guess I'm not really keen on the idea of trading hours for dollars. To each their own I guess.
You don't need any education, and not much enterprising spirit to do the book thing.
It's not a line of work that competes with developing software.