21–30 of 103 posts
This 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They could pull out the ones worth >$1 after checking on Amazon and then package and ship them - but thats probably not cost effective for a library employee and getting little old ladies to spend the day packaging and shipping isn't what they volunteered for.
They could get in some minimum wage temp labor to do this once a year - but that's not really the libraries core business. It would be like having police patrol cars pick up cans by the side of the freeway for the 5c recycling (now theres a business model)
This is pretty cool. In all my time going used book sales, I've never seen anyone doing this. Maybe I just go at the wrong times. I wonder what the economics are here. Using his setup, you can get an Axim X51 on eBay for around $100 and the scanner he uses goes for around $250 on eBay ($384 new). That's at least $350 in initial costs. Assuming a profit of $5 per book (just a wild guess) you'd need to sell 70 books to…
Semi-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 sortin…
The best used book store for tech books that I have ever seen is http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks
It is my understanding that they buy technical books only on certain days when they can have local grad students come in and do the appraisals.
I though "well, first I need to sell some books, so I know what it's actually like" I'd hit craigslist for anyone wanting to move more than 500 books for under $0.10 per. At my peak I think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of quality.
It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks.
Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix.
It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books (which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks.
my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to pick through the mess.)
I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.
This is pretty cool. In all my time going used book sales, I've never seen anyone doing this. Maybe I just go at the wrong times. I wonder what the economics are here. Using his setup, you can get an Axim X51 on eBay for around $100 and the scanner he uses goes for around $250 on eBay ($384 new). That's at least $350 in initial costs. Assuming a profit of $5 per book (just a wild guess) you'd need to sell 70 books to…
Laser barcode scanners are in a different league from the barcode scanners on smartphones that decode a photo. the bottleneck is how fast you can position the book.
(of course, in his case, he's got to wait for his thing to go look up the price, which may take considerably more time.)
He never explains why he feels bad about it. It seems like a perfectly respectable profession to me, bringing books from ignored corners of dank bookstores to the hands of those who really want them.
He never explains why he feels bad about it. It seems like a perfectly respectable profession to me, bringing books from ignored corners of dank bookstores to the hands of those who really want them.
It's actually of benefit - there is a book out there that I want but it's hidden in a library or garage sale in a city 1000mi away. This guy makes it available for me to buy at a price I set on Amazon - rather than the book ending up in the trash and me not having what I want.
I frequent a local thrift store (Deseret Industries, run by the LDS church), where I always quickly scan all 6 book shelves. Every morning (that I've been there that early), there's one dude that rushes his way to the "new" book shelves (the ones that were just rolled out of the back and not yet sorted onto the shelves), towing a cart, and he proceeds to monopolize the shelves as he roots through all the books and searches them manually on his phone (which I assume it internet-enabled).
I can't help but get a little annoyed by his presence, especially once I figured out what he was doing. He wasn't reading all those books, of course; he was hoping to make a profit on them. I, like many others, look for books to, you know, actually read, and I view this man's actions as rude. Likewise, when I offload a box or two of books to this same store, I am doing so out of a desire to give back to the local community, and it kind of chaps my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same book I donated.
These days, because of this leech at the thrift store, I'm more inclined to simply shred my books (they make good animal bedding and compost well) than take the effort to load them up into the car and donate them. Sure, that may be viewed as somewhat selfish, but then again, that's exactly how I view that guy who buys all the books to make a quick buck.