I have seen two different ideas about this in the past. One: money laundering. Anyone can say they are a book seller and sell to themselves or an accomplice, pay the fees and taxes and the rest is then legitimate income. Two: warring bots. One bot keeps raising their price slightly above the most expensive other copy for sale. And when there are two such bots there may be no upper limit. In the past I've seen books priced for $1000 U.S. or more when identical copies were for sale for a few dollars.
Ask HN: Why is this C Programming Book Worth $674.99
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Re: Ask HN: Why is this C Programming Book Worth $674.99
#12A lot of people think this is an Amazon thing. But every bookstore that lists this book have it for similarly high prices. Even used copies are a couple hundred bucks.
But every bookstore that lists this book have it for similarly high prices.
It's the same batch of sellers, selling across most all of those sites. Or to the extent that there are sellers who are, say, on Ebay but not Amazon, or vice versa, they have bots tracking the prices across all the sites. In either case, I find that you just don't get much price variance across book selling sites these days. I mean, sure, there are occasional exceptions, but by and large, prices tend to converge to a common value, or at least to a small range around that.