5 ms·

A Penny for Your Books

25 points by Brendinooo 11y ago

ChuckMcM 11y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019
DaveWalk 11y ago
The penny booksellers always fascinated me. The reporting in this piece has some interesting data: Thriftbooks sells 12 million books a year, for something like $2 per book (on the $0.01 cost + $3.99 shipping). I imagine Amazon could have some serious leverage if it wanted to. And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Is that maybe the source of the industry? Supply is overwhelmingly high. I know this model is the same for Hollywood and VCs, but wow. I can't imagine if 300,000 movies were released on DVD every year.
- cba9 11y ago
  > And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Isn't it amazing? And about that rate has been sustained for decades, as well. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of books being published every year for decades? Who's writing them? How is this economicly sustainable? (If it's not, do we really need to incentivize publication with ever longer copyright?) This is why when Google Books tried to estimate how many books had ever been published, they got a lower bound of 129 million and no real idea how much off they might be. And it's not just books, either. There's maybe 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+. The number of feature films keeps going up (4000 a year not terribly long ago). The TV industry is feeling shellshocked by just how many programs are in production now. And all these numbers seem like they must be undercounts because who is really able to track how many new songs get uploaded to Youtube every day by professionals, amateurs, and all sorts of indescribable people? And in the rest of the world like China?
  - extra88 11y ago
    > 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+ Even assuming a lifetime is 100 years, that would be only 10 million albums. There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime. I think a lot of albums don't take much effort to produce, EPs from garage bands and bedroom turntablists probably require less effort than even a trashy novel. Of course a decent number of those 300,000 new books are very low-effort affairs as well.
    - cba9 11y ago
      > There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime. Sorry, I left out that part of Kelly's estimate of 1b songs is that album rates will also continue to increase at the historical rate. It seems improbable to me that we could really hit 1.1b songs by 2060 (it's such a mindboggling number), but on the other hand, the world keeps getting wealthier, making music keeps getting cheaper, and the appetite and dreams of people for making music seems to know no limits...
- Brendinooo 11y ago
  That's a good point - I'd really be interested in someone modeling/visualizing the size of the primary market vs. the secondary market.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
I'd like to see more focus on the fact that Amazon is straight-up lying about shipping-and-handling costs, which is how these guys are able to list books as selling for $0.01+$3.99 S&H when it's more like $2+$2 S&H. I had thought it was "just" the sellers being dishonest, but apparently it's an Amazon mandate: > A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way. At least they've gotten better about showing the full price with shipping in the comparison page, but that only mitigates the issue.
- paulcole 11y ago
  What exactly are they lying about? $.01 is the cost of the book and Amazon charges the customer $3.99 to cover shipping and handling?
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    You think the third-party seller actually makes a gross profit of $0.01 per book? They're taking additional profit out of the "shipping & handling".
- mcphage 11y ago
  They're not lying. $3.99 is what they charge for shipping and handling.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- tiglionabbit 11y ago
  Maybe the rest of the $3.99 is for the seller to spend on shipping and handling.
Johnny555 11y ago
I bought a lot of used books from Amazon when shipping used to cost $1.99 or $2.99, but now that it's $3.99, there's less of a differential between the cost of a new book (or Kindle book) and the cost of a used book (that may have problems like missing pages, which happened to me twice -- very frustrating to be hours into a book and find out that several pages were torn out for some reason). So now I rarely buy used. Though I guess enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile to sell them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gregn 11y ago
  Go to abebooks.com. Often the same sellers sell the exact same books there but with 2.50 shipping instead of 3.99. I almost never shop at amazon anymore for the simple reason that their used book base shipping rate is too high. But that's me; I'm addicted to used books.
  - DaveWalk 11y ago
    I'm right there with you. I find the psychological race-to-the-bottom fascinating: a book at $4 is not nearly worth it when it could cost $2.50.
dmschulman 11y ago
I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination was to hop onto Amazon and find as many used titles at $1 or less as I could. Only after filling my cart did I discover my $24 worth of books would cost $80 to ship. I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd otherwise be decomposing in a landfill. With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my money rather than 7 cents per book.
- gregn 11y ago
  check out abebooks.com. They have the best search engine for books when it comes to facts about the specific book, such as: is it a first edition? If its a hard cover, does it come with a dust jacket, and if so what condition are both in? Cheers
WalterBright 11y ago
The local libraries around here get rid of books at $.25 to $2.00 each. I pick up a lot of sci fi that way.

25 points by Brendinooo 11y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019

The penny booksellers always fascinated me. The reporting in this piece has some interesting data: Thriftbooks sells 12 million books a year, for something like $2 per book (on the $0.01 cost + $3.99 shipping). I imagine Amazon could have some serious leverage if it wanted to. And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Is that maybe the source of the industry? Supply is overwhelmingly high. I know this model is the same for Hollywood and VCs, but wow. I can't imagine if 300,000 movies were released on DVD every year.

cba9 11y ago
> And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like a lot? Isn't it amazing? And about that rate has been sustained for decades, as well. Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of books being published every year for decades? Who's writing them? How is this economicly sustainable? (If it's not, do we really need to incentivize publication with ever longer copyright?) This is why when Google Books tried to estimate how many books had ever been published, they got a lower bound of 129 million and no real idea how much off they might be. And it's not just books, either. There's maybe 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+. The number of feature films keeps going up (4000 a year not terribly long ago). The TV industry is feeling shellshocked by just how many programs are in production now. And all these numbers seem like they must be undercounts because who is really able to track how many new songs get uploaded to Youtube every day by professionals, amateurs, and all sorts of indescribable people? And in the rest of the world like China?
- extra88 11y ago
  > 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+ Even assuming a lifetime is 100 years, that would be only 10 million albums. There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime. I think a lot of albums don't take much effort to produce, EPs from garage bands and bedroom turntablists probably require less effort than even a trashy novel. Of course a decent number of those 300,000 new books are very low-effort affairs as well.
  - cba9 11y ago
    > There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion in a lifetime. Sorry, I left out that part of Kelly's estimate of 1b songs is that album rates will also continue to increase at the historical rate. It seems improbable to me that we could really hit 1.1b songs by 2060 (it's such a mindboggling number), but on the other hand, the world keeps getting wealthier, making music keeps getting cheaper, and the appetite and dreams of people for making music seems to know no limits...
Brendinooo 11y ago
That's a good point - I'd really be interested in someone modeling/visualizing the size of the primary market vs. the secondary market.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

I'd like to see more focus on the fact that Amazon is straight-up lying about shipping-and-handling costs, which is how these guys are able to list books as selling for $0.01+$3.99 S&H when it's more like $2+$2 S&H. I had thought it was "just" the sellers being dishonest, but apparently it's an Amazon mandate: > A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor, rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way. At least they've gotten better about showing the full price with shipping in the comparison page, but that only mitigates the issue.

paulcole 11y ago
What exactly are they lying about? $.01 is the cost of the book and Amazon charges the customer $3.99 to cover shipping and handling?
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  You think the third-party seller actually makes a gross profit of $0.01 per book? They're taking additional profit out of the "shipping & handling".
mcphage 11y ago
They're not lying. $3.99 is what they charge for shipping and handling.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tiglionabbit 11y ago
Maybe the rest of the $3.99 is for the seller to spend on shipping and handling.

Johnny555 11y ago

I bought a lot of used books from Amazon when shipping used to cost $1.99 or $2.99, but now that it's $3.99, there's less of a differential between the cost of a new book (or Kindle book) and the cost of a used book (that may have problems like missing pages, which happened to me twice -- very frustrating to be hours into a book and find out that several pages were torn out for some reason). So now I rarely buy used. Though I guess enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile to sell them.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
gregn 11y ago
Go to abebooks.com. Often the same sellers sell the exact same books there but with 2.50 shipping instead of 3.99. I almost never shop at amazon anymore for the simple reason that their used book base shipping rate is too high. But that's me; I'm addicted to used books.
- DaveWalk 11y ago
  I'm right there with you. I find the psychological race-to-the-bottom fascinating: a book at $4 is not nearly worth it when it could cost $2.50.

dmschulman 11y ago

I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination was to hop onto Amazon and find as many used titles at $1 or less as I could. Only after filling my cart did I discover my $24 worth of books would cost $80 to ship. I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd otherwise be decomposing in a landfill. With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my money rather than 7 cents per book.

gregn 11y ago
check out abebooks.com. They have the best search engine for books when it comes to facts about the specific book, such as: is it a first edition? If its a hard cover, does it come with a dust jacket, and if so what condition are both in? Cheers

WalterBright 11y ago

The local libraries around here get rid of books at $.25 to $2.00 each. I pick up a lot of sci fi that way.