Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman • Hacker News Board

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#51

Post by epochwolf » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:35 AM UTC

lsc wrote: post #26

aed wrote: post #8

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…

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.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#52

Post by trop » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:44 AM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #30

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I detest these people. I see them always in big book sales: they come in very early, hoard all the books that they think are valuable, and I mean hundreds of books and then scan through them nervously. In the end they pick their selection and leave the mess in a corner. Meanwhile, I do not have access to those books!

Yes, it seems double-edged trouble: On on hand, this commodifies a situation that before lent itself to serendipity and erudition. On the other hand, this also sets up a feedback loop, where the scanners only find books that have already been pre-valued via Amazon-crowds. When I look at the author's Amazon shop, the content seems utterly banal, depressing compared to that of a good used bookstore.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#53

Post by qqqq2010 » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:57 AM UTC

shalmanese wrote: post #13

This 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?

The Lorem Ipsum book store in Cambridge, MA does just this. It was started by some MIT kids (afaik) with some basic algorithms set up to judge the "goodness" of a book when they go to sales or get turn-ins from customers for store credit. They don't solely include the Amazon sale price of a book though, somehow they definitely include unique-ness or coolness: their store is stuffed to the gills with amazingly interesting books on all topics (all of which are cross listed on Amazon also).

Seems to work for them. How many other independent bookstores have gone under lately? When I moved out of Cambridge last year, Lorem Ipsum was just upgrading to a new, larger facility.

http://www.loremipsumbooks.com/

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#54

Post by gregable » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 1:58 AM 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…

I doubt this guy visits used book shops. He mentions thrift shops. Used book shops generally are quite savvy to the real value of a book in the same way this guy is. They are profiting from the same arbitrage he is. Used book shops have the added advantage that the original sellers often come straight to the book shop, having never offered their books to any other market, so they can buy without competition.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#55

Post by klbarry » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

I guess I must also not be going to the right sales, at the right time. I've been to many many where I live and have never seen a scanner. That said, I think what he's doing is awesome - most of the books he takes are probably pretty banal anyway, as someone else pointed out.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#56

Post by jholman » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 2:14 AM UTC

tkeller wrote: post #27

hugh3 wrote: post #2

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.

Exactly. There's nothing dishonorable about arbitrage.

I agree that there's nothing necessarily dishonourable about arbitrage, and I agree that based on his story, this man is doing honourable work.

However, I think that there is a potential problem in some arbitrage. Arbitrage depends on information asymmetry, and I think that labouring to perpetuate information asymmetry is unethical. (I would say that failing to eliminate the asymmetry when you could easily do so is a grey area.) So if you are an arbitrageur in an area where the market is trying to eliminate your advantage, you have a moral hazard.

This perspective was driven by utilitarian ethics, of course.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#57

Post by muhfuhkuh » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 2:52 AM UTC

Lazlo_Nibble wrote: post #35

hugh3 wrote: post #2

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's doing solitary piecework that requires absolutely nothing from him other than his physical presence. Find the bar code, scan it, save or discard based on the result, over and over again. It's on roughly the same intellectual level as stuffing envelopes for a living. Were I in his shoes, I wouldn't just feel bad about it, I'd find it soul-destroying .

"solitary piecework that requires absolutely nothing from him other than his physical presence"

Wow, that's not how I see it at all. I mean, if you remove the entire technological aspect with his setup and the gut determinations he makes on book values besides, then I guess oil discovery and drilling is just being there while a machine drills you into riches.

Just because repetition is boring to you doesn't mean the work is worthless or demeaning.

"Were I in his shoes, I wouldn't just feel bad about it, I'd find it soul-destroying."

Soul-destroying to make a living saving a book from going essentially into a landfill? Wouldn't that then apply to all used product sales? Auctioneers like Sotheby's and Christie's are performing soul-destroying work. Actually, they'd be _worse_ than what the book reseller is doing because they do absolutely NO footwork at all. People bring their junk to the auctioneer, and the auctioneer just gives out paddles! Now, THAT sounds soul-destroying!

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#58

Post by wyclif » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:27 AM UTC

gregable wrote: post #54

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…

I doubt this guy visits used book shops. He mentions thrift shops. Used book shops generally are quite savvy to the real value of a book in the same way this guy is. They are profiting from the same arbitrage he is. Used book shops have the added advantage that the original sellers often come straight to the book shop, having never offered their books to any other market, so they can buy without competition.

Agreed, this guy is a thrift shopper and I feel what he is doing is legit, he's competing at a lower level where the books are sorted to value.

Having worked in a high-end, selective used bookshop, there is a lot of arbitrage and upselling and in many cases it is worth it. It costs money to cull the good stock and resell it. You're also correct about market: one of my fave bookshops is a converted barn and the front foyer is often full of books from broken up libraries which were brought direct from an estate and not sold at the auction.

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#59

Post by llimllib » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:53 AM UTC

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)

Re: Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

#60

Post by Dove » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 3:56 AM UTC

At Value Village (a thrift store), items are priced with colored tags. They are left on the racks for a few weeks, go through a week at 50% off, and then spend one day at 99 cents before being removed and discarded. That last markdown to 99 cents occurs regardless of the original price. Computer desks, leather jackets, sewing machines -- they go for 99 cents on that day.

I observed a unique phenomenon on 99 cent day: there was usually a crowd when we opened the store, and they moved quickly and bought a lot of random things. After some reflection, I figured they were probably resellers.