Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#81

Post by dedward » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:57 PM UTC

DLWormwood wrote: post #32

tkeller wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There's nothing dishonorable about arbitrage.

A big deal with this may be due to upbringing and what part of the country/world you come from. While part of me dreams of being able to do this kind of work (I’m the exploration type), I can’t, since I can’t drive, limiting my searching ability. Regardless, my background keeps a nagging sense of impropriety of arbitrage in my mind. To my parents and my childhood role models, it’s not “real work,” since it neither cr…

It creates a new opportunity for the seller - those individual books were previously not available online. they were just sitting in a bookshop. Finding these books, then placing them online, and handling the shipping to the buyer is certainly adding value.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#82

Post by ryanelkins » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 2:41 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #50

lionhearted wrote: post #46

I respect this guy a lot. There's been enough times I wanted to get an obscure out of print book and I can only find copies that cost $60 or even $200+. Taking a book off the shelf, paying the used bookseller and freeing up their cash/space, and stocking the inventory in his home for the whole world to be able to buy the book online - man, the guy's almost a saint in my book. Some people are upset he's making a profi…

> Some people are upset he's making a profit. Is that really what "some people" are upset about? That's not the impression I get either from the article or from comments here. Some people are upset that he, and others like him, are making it harder or less pleasant for them to buy used books. Some people are (something rather less than) upset because what he's doing displeases them aesthetically -- books are meant to…

This is simply arbitrage. The book sellers don't take the time to do the research to price their books accordingly or offer them for sale online which creates a profit margin from the price difference between the two markets. He's not marking them up to some unreasonable level and controlling the book supply - he's correcting the sale price to reflect market value.

The book sellers are obviously missing potential revenue here. Eventually they might wise up and start doing this themselves, or maybe a startup will come along to help them with this, cutting guys like this out.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#83

Post by orenmazor » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 2:46 PM UTC

lsc wrote: post #25

many years ago, back when I was sawed-off software (arguably a much cooler name than prgmr.com) while the software for all this was still being built, my goal was to create software for these people. I failed, but it was an amusing story. 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 not only enjoyed your post, but laughed when you said you were obsessed with pre-isbn scanning. I can instantly guarantee that would be a mistake I would make as well.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#84

Post by chwahoo » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:21 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #68

SageRaven wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on perspective, I suppose. It can be a detriment to the local market. 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…

If you are concerned about that, why not donate one of those book scanner thingies to the thrift store. Then they can set the prices accordingly, and become uninteresting to the book scanners.

I suspect the thrift store would need to sell on Amazon, with its broader customer base, in order to support itself with higher prices.

Another alternative would be to sell your books on Amazon yourself, at the going rate, and then donate the proceeds to a library or other organization that has local impact.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#85

Post by ultrasaurus » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:21 PM UTC

ryanelkins wrote: post #82

gjm11 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people are upset he's making a profit. Is that really what "some people" are upset about? That's not the impression I get either from the article or from comments here. Some people are upset that he, and others like him, are making it harder or less pleasant for them to buy used books. Some people are (something rather less than) upset because what he's doing displeases them aesthetically -- books are meant to…

This is simply arbitrage. The book sellers don't take the time to do the research to price their books accordingly or offer them for sale online which creates a profit margin from the price difference between the two markets. He's not marking them up to some unreasonable level and controlling the book supply - he's correcting the sale price to reflect market value. The book sellers are obviously missing potential rev…

I really wouldn't want to be in a business that relies on bookstores never buying an affordable, easy-to-use tool that would increase their profits.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#86

Post by tjr » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:41 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #59

tjr wrote: post #18

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…

Are you in Maryland? (I helped to start a half-price book store, just curious if it's the company I used to work for)

I'm not in Maryland either.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#87

Post by lukev » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 4:56 PM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #59

tjr wrote: post #18

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…

Are you in Maryland? (I helped to start a half-price book store, just curious if it's the company I used to work for)

I'm in Maryland and have been having a hard time finding a good local used bookstore. What's the name of it?

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#88

Post by llimllib » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 5:14 PM UTC

lukev wrote: post #87

llimllib wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in Maryland? (I helped to start a half-price book store, just curious if it's the company I used to work for)

I'm in Maryland and have been having a hard time finding a good local used bookstore. What's the name of it?

http://www.ukazoo.com/

edit: awful website, neat technology behind the store though.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#89

Post by lukev » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 5:17 PM UTC

Fun project:

Build an OCR product that can identify a whole shelf of books at once - the title and author are almost always on the spine, which should be able to uniquely identify 99% of books.

It should actually be technically feasible. This would be a great project for someone doing graduate work in OCR or machine vision. Bonus points for doing it on a live video feed so you can just walk down an aisle pointing your iPhone at the shelf.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#90

Post by jcl » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 5:23 PM UTC

epochwolf wrote: post #51

lsc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I was inventorying my books, my goal was five seconds to scan a book, including dealing with the exceptions. 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.)

The database is stored locally on his pda so there are limits to just how slow it will get.

I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their prices.