I've seen this phenomenon discussed before on Hacker News and Reddit, and it's disappointing that the New York Times did a shallow article and didn't really get

I've seen this phenomenon discussed before on Hacker News and Reddit, and it's disappointing that the New York Times did a shallow article and didn't really get to the bottom of it. The explanations I've heard include: (1) Bots running against each other bidding up the price on obscure titles. One strategy might be to price a book that you don't have in stock at 10% greater than the other seller who presumably does have it. Then if you get an order, you buy the other seller's copy and ship it to your customer getting a 10% profit. But things run amuck if multiple bots follow the same strategy. (2) Exploiting people's stupidity and laziness. Almost nobody is going to buy your book for $2464, but if eventually somebody somewhere clicks on the purchase button--because they were too lazy to keep searching or thought it was the going price--well then you've earned the profit of selling 600 legitimate books (at, say, $4 profit each) by doing 1/600 of the work! This could indeed be your business model. (3) Money laundering. Ie., book buyer A with lots of ill-gotten cash buys a worthless book from seller B for a huge price. Seller B makes an enormous profit, pays his taxes, and appears to be a clean, highly successful rare book dealer. Buyer A and seller B are obviously part of the same organization, maybe the even the same person. (4) Automatic repricing software. If you're a large seller, you don't manually choose the price of each item, but leave it to an automatic system. You'd think that slow moving items would be priced cheaper to get rid of them. But perhaps the software keeps raising the price because it thinks it is a rare item, or due to errors in the algorithm. It's funny how everyone who speculates about this is convinced of their own explanation. I'm not so sure. It might be all of the reasons above in different proportions. I'd love it if someone who was actually doing this outrageous pricing would speak out and tell us first hand.