11 ms·

Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

231 points by mcknz 16y ago

hugh3 16y ago
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.
- imr 16y ago
  It is perfectly respectable to make the market more efficient, but elements of the marketplace (the elderly man and "No electronic devices allowed" sign) make him feel bad about it.
- edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
  It's actually of benefit - there is a book out there that I want but it's hidden in a library or garage sale in a city 1000mi away. This guy makes it available for me to buy at a price I set on Amazon - rather than the book ending up in the trash and me not having what I want.
  - SageRaven 16y ago
    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 he proceeds to monopolize the shelves as he roots through all the books and searches them manually on his phone (which I assume it internet-enabled). I can't help but get a little annoyed by his presence, especially once I figured out what he was doing. He wasn't reading all those books, of course; he was hoping to make a profit on them. I, like many others, look for books to, you know, actually read, and I view this man's actions as rude. Likewise, when I offload a box or two of books to this same store, I am doing so out of a desire to give back to the local community, and it kind of chaps my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same book I donated. These days, because of this leech at the thrift store, I'm more inclined to simply shred my books (they make good animal bedding and compost well) than take the effort to load them up into the car and donate them. Sure, that may be viewed as somewhat selfish, but then again, that's exactly how I view that guy who buys all the books to make a quick buck.
    - blacksmythe 16y ago
      I view what he is doing as recycling - getting used books to people who want them most. Shredding your books is not doing anyone any good.
      - SageRaven 16y ago
        As I said, the paper (books, bills, junk mail, printouts etc.) gets shredded and used for animal bedding, which then goes into the compost pile. This kind of localized recycling has all kinds of environmental benefits, including the enrichment of my garden soil, which reduces water used for irrigation and improves my home-grown produce.
        fr0sty 16y ago
        Yes, but shredding your books instead of donating them just to spite a reseller seems like sour grapes regardless of the justification. I agree that there is a temptation to wonder 'what if' about some young starry-eyed dreamer who may stumble upon a book who has instead had that chance snatched from him and will now turn to a life of crime but the reality is the book is far more likely headed for the trash heap than to a loving home. That being the case, it is far preferable to have the book go to a reseller and on to someone who wants it.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      it kind of chaps my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same book I donated. On the other hand, the copy bought on Amazon for five bucks might wind up in the hands of some poor nonlocal kid who betters himself using this book he really wanted. I have a bunch of books I bought at garage sales which I never really wanted but picked up because they were cheap (like, one-dollar hardcover biology textbooks) and I thought I might look at them someday. The world would probably be a better place if they had been bought by someone who really wanted them... or alternatively by a middleman who could sell them on. Of course I could sell them myself, but it's not worth figuring out how to do so in order to make whatever small amount of money is involved.
  - bapadna 16y ago
    This guy doesn't deal in those books. He deals in books with known prices and enough volume that he can be reasonably sure it'll sell in a moderate amount of time. If nobody else has it on amazon, this guy isn't buying it and putting it up there. Your stated benefit doesn't exist.
- tkeller 16y ago
  Exactly. There's nothing dishonorable about arbitrage.
  - DLWormwood 16y ago
    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 creates anything new or abides by the “sweat of your brow” requirement my more religious acquaintances would demand. TL;DR: I believe in “work smarter, not harder,” but most people I know/knew believe in the opposite.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      It does create something new, it creates value. I'm amazed at the 'arbitrage is bad' comments, I can't remember seeing it anywhere before. Someone who finds a buyer for a thing that couldn't be sold before (i.e., was worthless) creates value by enabling the transaction.
      - DLWormwood 16y ago
        To continue citing those from my background, “value” is an modern invention of “intellectuals,” and therefore, either of the devil or a liberal plot.
    - dedward 16y ago
      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.
  - jholman 16y ago
    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.
- Lazlo_Nibble 16y ago
  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.
  - muhfuhkuh 16y ago
    "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!
    - pyre 16y ago
      Monotonous work can be soul-destroying, but it just depends on your level of interest and excitement. Doing monotonous busy-work that you hate day-in and day-out is soul-destroying.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
  On purely abstract basis I suppose what he does is not immoral. On practical basis however there is a certain little voice which says but books are for reading, but what of the mystery of that book left there which someone all the sudden stumbles upon and changes his life. The people on amazon have already found out about these books. They will probably get them somehow at some point in some way. If however there was a perfect market, or even significantly perfected more than it currently is, that novelty of stumbling upon a book might be completely lost. I am not entirely certain though. I suppose in one way it is not immoral, but in another way you just get the feeling that what he does is not exactly as uncontroversial as what a doctor does or even marketer.
- ritonlajoie 16y ago
  Have you read page 2 ? Because he explains exactly his 'shame' feeling in a particular story.
hristov 16y ago
He should educate himself on older books. It seems that ISBNs have been out only since the 70s, which means that most truly valuable books won't have them. He is right that it will be rare if he actually sees a valuable old book, but since he is already going through so many books chances are he will see some from time to time. So he might as well learn something, so that he recognizes a truly valuable book when he sees it.
- scott_s 16y ago
  It's also rarely worthwhile to investigate anything that looks truly old or anything that doesn't have a barcode (which usually means it's old). It's certain that I've passed by very valuable old books. I do carry a smartphone along with the PDA so I can search online for curious pieces from the pre-ISBN era. But that research hardly ever pays off. My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn't wanted to conserve. It sounds like he has, but his own experience has taught him it's not worth the opportunity cost.
- m0nty 16y ago
  It seems that ISBNs have been out only since the 70s, which means that most truly valuable books won't have them. I almost did a web dev job for a bookseller who was closing his bricks-and-mortar store to go online, and he said the really profitable books were not the really old ones. It would be a book someone remembered from their childhood, etc. Mostly modern stuff. It takes a seriously long time for oldness to impart value.
AlexMuir 16y ago
I thought about building a system for charity/thrift stores that let them scan in the ISBN of every book donated. I'd run a central database so you could search for a book and see where it's in stock in your city. Likewise could set alerts for when a given book is donated - and helps store to price books appropriately. I decided it was unlikely that people would find the books they wanted in their city so it's pointless. Didn't see this angle though - catching the odd winner that goes unnoticed.
- llimllib 16y ago
  I used to work for a company that scans books donated to Goodwill/etc on a very large scale. They buy books from thrift stores and library systems by the ton, and have an automated process to scan them and determine if they're valuable or not.
ja27 16y ago
I've made a few good sales from library finds, usually on more timeless or slow-changing technology books. A COBOL book holds value a lot longer than a Java or .NET book. I've tried without success to convince my local Friends of the Library to sell the more profitable incoming books online themselves.
aed 16y ago
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 recoup that cost. Using his ratio of 1 "buy" to every 30 "reject" books, you'd have to go through 2,100 books to recoup your initial costs! Taking it a step further, if you could scan three books per minute (another wild guess), it would take 700 minutes, nearly 12 hours, of "hunting" to earn back you startup costs. Based on all those numbers and assumptions, your hourly earnings are roughly $30 per hour. ($350 / 12) Based on a standard 2,000 hours of work per year (basically, 5 days a week for 50 weeks), this comes to $30*2000 = $60,000.... awfully close to his estimate of $1,000 per week for a person working alone.
- cabacon 16y ago
  There's a used book sale I know about that charges a fee on the first day of the sale, and is free thereafter. It's basically a tax on the resellers, who all want to get access to the mis-priced books. If you go to used book sales, you're more likely to go on the free days, and hence won't see the resellers.
- lsc 16y ago
  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.)
  - epochwolf 16y ago
    The database is stored locally on his pda so there are limits to just how slow it will get.
    - 16y ago
jonpaul 16y ago
$1000 a week? That's it? Yes, I know that you can make a decent living on that (in the Midwest)... but for what? Would you truly be happy doing that? It just seems like a lot of busy work with little long-term return. Most software devs make much more than that. I guess I'm not really keen on the idea of trading hours for dollars. To each their own I guess.
- eru 16y ago
  You don't need any education, and not much enterprising spirit to do the book thing. It's not a line of work that competes with developing software.
kujawa 16y ago
This kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Ninth Gate, a rather under-appreciated Johnny Depp movie from about 10 years ago. Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.
- eru 16y ago
  She reads "How to win friends and influence people" on the train.
shalmanese 16y ago
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?
- edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
  Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do <50% of their business through the door. They make their money on Amazon, others don't even bother with the store anymore - they buy job lots of books put them in cheap warehouse space and sell them for 1c making money on the s+h This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers isn't really to invest $1000s in high tech to make a little more money.
  - eru 16y ago
    The library should give the scanners to the old ladies, then.
    - edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
      Presumably the library already has the ISBN of the books it is getting rid of. They could pull out the ones worth >$1 after checking on Amazon and then package and ship them - but thats probably not cost effective for a library employee and getting little old ladies to spend the day packaging and shipping isn't what they volunteered for. They could get in some minimum wage temp labor to do this once a year - but that's not really the libraries core business. It would be like having police patrol cars pick up cans by the side of the freeway for the 5c recycling (now theres a business model)
  - bluesnowmonkey 16y ago
    Sounds like a business opportunity. If someone wants to sell a bunch of books, they hire you to come scan it for valuable ones, sell them on Amazon and split the revenue. Then they can donate the rest or sell them for 50c. It benefits the seller, because they get into the Amazon market without investing in learning/equipment. It benefits you the arbiter because you get exclusive rights to the books, shutting out your competitors.
Tichy 16y ago
For ages I have dreamed about a service where shoppers could visit flea markets and do an immediate auction if they find something of value. There would be a live stream of "interesting" items on the site, and anybody who wants to buy could immediately connect to the shopper to make him buy the item. I guess there were too many problems with this model, and I didn't expect high interest (I was more in love with it from a tech angle, doing stuff with phones...). But I just realized that this book scanning business is actually a viable subset of that idea. If image recognition was better, it could also work for other items besides books. (Perhaps image recognition technology is actually good enough by now).
vdoma 16y ago
I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be, and head out. My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed. Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices at these sales.
johnwatson11218 16y ago
This year at the Phoenix Book Fair (http://www.vnsabooksale.org/ http://www.vnsabooksale.org/) there was an incident where 2 people who were in line when the doors opened got into a fight. Apparently both men had scanners and shopping carts and were scanning books for the same reason listed in the article. One of the men began reaching into the other's basket to scan his items and that is when the fight began. I think they were just grabbing handfuls of books and putting them in their basket and then starting to scan to see what to keep. I spoke with one of the organizers and she told me that she goes and sorts books twice a week at their warehouse. It is all volunteer work ... but it got me thinking that you could earn extra income by bringing a scanner. Although in this case it might be better to just alert the charity running the book sale of the item's value.
tjr 16y ago
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 sorting through what I had brought in, they offered me $13.50 for both boxes, which I gladly accepted. (My goal was clutter reduction, not profit.) A few hours later, they called me on the phone and said that they discovered one of the books I brought was more valuable than they first thought, and wanted to give me an extra $9.50. I found that refreshingly honest of them.
- johnwatson11218 16y ago
  Used book stores have a hard time figuring out how much math and computer books are worth. It seems like it was easier to sell them in the early 90s. Later there were so many new books being published during the dot com boom that most stores stopped accepting them. The books were becoming obsolete too quickly. The best used book store for tech books that I have ever seen is http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks It is my understanding that they buy technical books only on certain days when they can have local grad students come in and do the appraisals.
  - davidw 16y ago
    Powell's technical is a fantastic place. Anyone who goes through Portland should visit both Powell's and Powell's technical, which is a distinct store about a block away.
- angusgr 16y ago
  I have a vaguely similar story. A few years ago my parents found a box of Apple II books from when I was a kid. I saved a few favourites (my extremely-worn AppleSoft Basic reference manual, and a great circuit-level description of the entire Apple I system.) What to do with the rest? I spent 4 years working at a second hand bookstore, and I knew that computer books were generally treated as unsellable. Especially old ones. So I put the box on ebay for $1, with a full list of the books inside. Knowing that this way a wide audience would see them, and presumably I would reach a vintage computer enthusiast who would come, pick them up, and take them away. I wasn't looking to make money, I figured $10 or so would be the price - and a guarantee that the person actually wanted the books. The box sold for close to $300. The winning bidder was after a ProDOS reference book that I barely realised I even had. I have no idea what the second bidder was after.
lsc 16y ago
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 think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of quality. It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks. Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix. It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books (which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks. my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to pick through the mess.) I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.
- orenmazor 16y ago
  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.
asmithmd1 16y ago
If the goal of sales that ban scanners is to get the book into the hands of someone who wants to read it they could do what the Baltimore Book Thing does when they give away free books -- stamp the title page as a free book, not for resale. Kind of like the viral effect of GPL. Once a book has been through the Baltimore Book thing's hands it is always free http://www.bookthing.org http://www.bookthing.org
- angusgr 16y ago
  This is an admirable idea, but I can't help but think of the number of CDs I've bought at used record stores with "Not For Resale" stickers still affixed. Label review samples that had gone into the second hand channel just fine. Also I know from experience that used book sellers will often quite happily clip or black out portions of the frontispiece or half-title page if they need/want to. Collectible book dealers are also quite happy selling galley proofs of classic books, in fact some people collect them. They're also usually marked "not for sale".
  - ryanpetrich 16y ago
    I think the first-sale doctrine might make that sticker a mere suggestion.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      If the copy was acquired through some private, contracted method the first-sale doctrine might not apply. For example, if you're given a private review copy of a book under a no-sale contract that you agree to, that's enforceable, at least in theory, and the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply. However it's pretty hard to police, and almost all the policing effort that anybody does expend is pre-release, to try to track down people trying to sell review copies on eBay before the street date; nobody spends much effort tracking down people who then sold those review copies 5 years later.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    Last year I bought a used book through Amazon, that upon arrival turned out to be a galley proof. I was a little annoyed that it hadn't been marked as such, but I kind of thought that it might be collectible in some way.
Jun8 16y ago
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!
- stevoski 16y ago
  Sure you have access to these second-hand books - at the going market rate on Amazon.
  - Jun8 16y ago
    Let me explain more clearly (i) they quickly hoard together good books at the sale, cutting off access to other prospective buyers on location, like me, (ii) they buy a very small percentage of the books they hoard (guy in the OP says 1 in 30), the others books are just left in an unordered pile, so it's hard for other people to find them, and finally (iii) they create a mess for the sale organizers, I've heard many organizers complain about them and some sales won't let them in. It's like a guy who runs in a cafeteria, gets all the good desserts and then tries to sell them to you.
    - roel_v 16y ago
      Well sounds like the people organizing the book sale are doing a bad job keeping their patrons in check, then. No matter where you go, there are always going to be assholes. I have friend & family who own bars & restaurants - I can tell you that a guy trying to monopolize the dessert buffet and causing annoyance to the other guests is going to find himself outside on the pavement real quick.
  - deleted 16y ago
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- trop 16y ago
  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.
stevoski 16y ago
On a voluntary, part-time basis, I used to run a second-hand store for my church. A good part of our sales were to second-hand book stores, second-hand furniture stores, second-hand CD stores, and second-hand (read: retro/vintage) clothing stores. I loved these customers - they came reliably and almost always bought something. They didn't haggle, and didn't ask for credit or for things to be held for them. The guy who wrote this Slate article is doing a similar thing - being a regular purchasing customer of the places he frequents.
jdoliner 16y ago
While this arbitrage is fun and makes you feel very clever (as arbitrage almost always does). I'm not sure why this is framed as "Confessions." The author pretends this is some affront to books but books are one of the earliest mass produced commodities in existence (perhaps the earliest), this ease of redistribution is really one of the most important features of books.
angusgr 16y ago
Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought might be valuable. I think, especially at that time (2001-2004), the internet was inflating rather than devaluing used book prices in Australia. The strangest people are dealers/collectors who would spend hours of their saturday in the store, eventually buying a cheap book so they could smugly inform you, the seller, that it was a collectible edition, worth much more than they paid. Or that they would be swapping the dust jacket from this copy onto their copy, thereby improving its condition, even though this jacket was from the second printing not the first. Or dozens of other strange obscure tricks. Those are the people who don't need scanners, and presumably would resent them as a poor substitute for their encyclopedic knowledge.
lionhearted 16y ago
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 profit. This is crazy to me - the guy's making by his own numbers $4000 per month for 80 hour workweeks and amazing customer service, and he's making 10,000+ titles available online that might otherwise not be. If I ever see someone with the book scanner thing, I'm going to thank them and tell them I think they're doing a great thing for the world.
- gjm11 16y ago
  > 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 be treated with reverence, bought and sold by people who love them, etc. But I don't see anyone saying "He's making a profit, and that's bad". As to whether what he's doing is, on balance, beneficial or harmful, I don't think we have enough information to know for sure. Scenario 1. A small minority of particularly good used-book shops, which would otherwise have had real trouble selling their merchandise, are visited by people like this; the result is that lots of books from their shelves are made available to people who want them, and that the booksellers stay in business. Everyone wins. Scenario 2. All the world's used-book shops are deluged with people like this. As soon as any new books arrive they pounce on them. The result is that all the books anyone wants are sold at higher prices, reducing their availability to people with less money; and that the used-book shops no longer get any "normal" customers because most of the interesting books disappear as soon as they hit the shelves, and that after a while the booksellers give up in disgust. Everyone loses. Presumably the truth is somewhere in between. I'd guess it's much closer to Scenario 1. But fearing Scenario 2 isn't really all that crazy.
  - 16y ago
waivej 16y ago
To me he seemed like a primitive cyborg. I'm having fun imagining what we'll see in 20-30 years. Also it's the hidden the gold makes panning fun. These guys are using fancy tools to strip it out and leave thrift stores with piles of leftover dirt.
klbarry 16y ago
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.
Dove 16y ago
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.
latch 16y ago
Enjoyed this a lot. Its a great story that stands on its own. Having said that, a part of me wants more details about the business...avg/min/max markup, avg/min/max time to resell, insurance cost (if any), markup on shipping. % of online business (or is 100% amazon (probably))....
cjy 16y ago
I can totally relate to this article. My college library would sell books it got from estate sales but didn't want. I would hang out in the library with my laptop looking up ISBNs on amazon. I found a few gems and sold a cake decorating handbook for $150. I can identify with the feeling of shame. I think it is a noble job, but something felt wrong about skimming books only for their monetary value. It was an irrational emotion, but it was hard to shake.
maurits 16y ago
This reminds me a bit of high frequency trading. He is fast, thrives on market inefficiencies and is somewhat frowned upon.
Tichy 16y ago
What makes traditional barcode scanners so much more efficient than smartphone cameras? Any chance to catch up on speed?
roel_v 16y ago
Maybe there's money to be made here in an automated way (call it the HFT of the used-book markets). I was looking for the Graphics Gems series on Amazon & Abebooks the other day, and the cheapest ones went for 1-4 dollars, while the expensive ones went for 40-60 dollars (not sure if they're getting sold at that price, but it's the asking price). If one would scan these sits and identify wide spreads, one could buy up the inventory at the bottom of the market and re-list at market price. Maybe one could deal with the transaction costs (S&H) by agreeing on bulk shipping or so, or letting sellers ship directly to the end-customer if one can be found within a week or two (agree with the seller that they keep the book in inventory for two weeks, if you find a seller within that time have it shipped directly, otherwise to your own storage).
lelele 16y ago
> We were in the library's book-sale room when I overheard him telling his friend that the two of them were surrounded by assholes—that is, the people scanning. Just a competitor feeling the heat ;-)
lukev 16y ago
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.
burnout1540 16y ago
I have some confessions to make too. I did what this guy did but in a much more automated, scalable fashion. I did online book marketplace arbitrage. Basically, I wrote software to automatically find books for sale on one used book site on the web and listed the same book for sale (with a markup) on another site. If my listing was purchased, my software would automatically purchase the book from the original seller and have it shipped directly to my buyer. In the second half of 2007 I did over $200K in sales and had 10s of thousands of books listed for sale at a time. If anyone has any interest, I might write a blog post about it.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  Out of $200K in sales, what was your take home?
  - burnout1540 16y ago
    About $50K. It was still ramping up at the time though and I am aware of people doing the same thing who, I believe, are easily making $1M+.
noverloop 16y ago
Arbitrage in action

231 points by mcknz 16y ago

hugh3 16y ago

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.

imr 16y ago
It is perfectly respectable to make the market more efficient, but elements of the marketplace (the elderly man and "No electronic devices allowed" sign) make him feel bad about it.
edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
It's actually of benefit - there is a book out there that I want but it's hidden in a library or garage sale in a city 1000mi away. This guy makes it available for me to buy at a price I set on Amazon - rather than the book ending up in the trash and me not having what I want.
- SageRaven 16y ago
  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 he proceeds to monopolize the shelves as he roots through all the books and searches them manually on his phone (which I assume it internet-enabled). I can't help but get a little annoyed by his presence, especially once I figured out what he was doing. He wasn't reading all those books, of course; he was hoping to make a profit on them. I, like many others, look for books to, you know, actually read, and I view this man's actions as rude. Likewise, when I offload a box or two of books to this same store, I am doing so out of a desire to give back to the local community, and it kind of chaps my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same book I donated. These days, because of this leech at the thrift store, I'm more inclined to simply shred my books (they make good animal bedding and compost well) than take the effort to load them up into the car and donate them. Sure, that may be viewed as somewhat selfish, but then again, that's exactly how I view that guy who buys all the books to make a quick buck.
  - blacksmythe 16y ago
    I view what he is doing as recycling - getting used books to people who want them most. Shredding your books is not doing anyone any good.
    - SageRaven 16y ago
      As I said, the paper (books, bills, junk mail, printouts etc.) gets shredded and used for animal bedding, which then goes into the compost pile. This kind of localized recycling has all kinds of environmental benefits, including the enrichment of my garden soil, which reduces water used for irrigation and improves my home-grown produce.
      - fr0sty 16y ago
        Yes, but shredding your books instead of donating them just to spite a reseller seems like sour grapes regardless of the justification. I agree that there is a temptation to wonder 'what if' about some young starry-eyed dreamer who may stumble upon a book who has instead had that chance snatched from him and will now turn to a life of crime but the reality is the book is far more likely headed for the trash heap than to a loving home. That being the case, it is far preferable to have the book go to a reseller and on to someone who wants it.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    it kind of chaps my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same book I donated. On the other hand, the copy bought on Amazon for five bucks might wind up in the hands of some poor nonlocal kid who betters himself using this book he really wanted. I have a bunch of books I bought at garage sales which I never really wanted but picked up because they were cheap (like, one-dollar hardcover biology textbooks) and I thought I might look at them someday. The world would probably be a better place if they had been bought by someone who really wanted them... or alternatively by a middleman who could sell them on. Of course I could sell them myself, but it's not worth figuring out how to do so in order to make whatever small amount of money is involved.
- bapadna 16y ago
  This guy doesn't deal in those books. He deals in books with known prices and enough volume that he can be reasonably sure it'll sell in a moderate amount of time. If nobody else has it on amazon, this guy isn't buying it and putting it up there. Your stated benefit doesn't exist.
tkeller 16y ago
Exactly. There's nothing dishonorable about arbitrage.
- DLWormwood 16y ago
  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 creates anything new or abides by the “sweat of your brow” requirement my more religious acquaintances would demand. TL;DR: I believe in “work smarter, not harder,” but most people I know/knew believe in the opposite.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    It does create something new, it creates value. I'm amazed at the 'arbitrage is bad' comments, I can't remember seeing it anywhere before. Someone who finds a buyer for a thing that couldn't be sold before (i.e., was worthless) creates value by enabling the transaction.
    - DLWormwood 16y ago
      To continue citing those from my background, “value” is an modern invention of “intellectuals,” and therefore, either of the devil or a liberal plot.
  - dedward 16y ago
    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.
- jholman 16y ago
  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.
Lazlo_Nibble 16y ago
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.
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago
  "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!
  - pyre 16y ago
    Monotonous work can be soul-destroying, but it just depends on your level of interest and excitement. Doing monotonous busy-work that you hate day-in and day-out is soul-destroying.
Andrew_Quentin 16y ago
On purely abstract basis I suppose what he does is not immoral. On practical basis however there is a certain little voice which says but books are for reading, but what of the mystery of that book left there which someone all the sudden stumbles upon and changes his life. The people on amazon have already found out about these books. They will probably get them somehow at some point in some way. If however there was a perfect market, or even significantly perfected more than it currently is, that novelty of stumbling upon a book might be completely lost. I am not entirely certain though. I suppose in one way it is not immoral, but in another way you just get the feeling that what he does is not exactly as uncontroversial as what a doctor does or even marketer.
ritonlajoie 16y ago
Have you read page 2 ? Because he explains exactly his 'shame' feeling in a particular story.

hristov 16y ago

He should educate himself on older books. It seems that ISBNs have been out only since the 70s, which means that most truly valuable books won't have them. He is right that it will be rare if he actually sees a valuable old book, but since he is already going through so many books chances are he will see some from time to time. So he might as well learn something, so that he recognizes a truly valuable book when he sees it.

scott_s 16y ago
It's also rarely worthwhile to investigate anything that looks truly old or anything that doesn't have a barcode (which usually means it's old). It's certain that I've passed by very valuable old books. I do carry a smartphone along with the PDA so I can search online for curious pieces from the pre-ISBN era. But that research hardly ever pays off. My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn't wanted to conserve. It sounds like he has, but his own experience has taught him it's not worth the opportunity cost.
m0nty 16y ago
It seems that ISBNs have been out only since the 70s, which means that most truly valuable books won't have them. I almost did a web dev job for a bookseller who was closing his bricks-and-mortar store to go online, and he said the really profitable books were not the really old ones. It would be a book someone remembered from their childhood, etc. Mostly modern stuff. It takes a seriously long time for oldness to impart value.

AlexMuir 16y ago

I thought about building a system for charity/thrift stores that let them scan in the ISBN of every book donated. I'd run a central database so you could search for a book and see where it's in stock in your city. Likewise could set alerts for when a given book is donated - and helps store to price books appropriately. I decided it was unlikely that people would find the books they wanted in their city so it's pointless. Didn't see this angle though - catching the odd winner that goes unnoticed.

llimllib 16y ago
I used to work for a company that scans books donated to Goodwill/etc on a very large scale. They buy books from thrift stores and library systems by the ton, and have an automated process to scan them and determine if they're valuable or not.

ja27 16y ago

I've made a few good sales from library finds, usually on more timeless or slow-changing technology books. A COBOL book holds value a lot longer than a Java or .NET book. I've tried without success to convince my local Friends of the Library to sell the more profitable incoming books online themselves.

aed 16y ago

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 recoup that cost. Using his ratio of 1 "buy" to every 30 "reject" books, you'd have to go through 2,100 books to recoup your initial costs! Taking it a step further, if you could scan three books per minute (another wild guess), it would take 700 minutes, nearly 12 hours, of "hunting" to earn back you startup costs. Based on all those numbers and assumptions, your hourly earnings are roughly $30 per hour. ($350 / 12) Based on a standard 2,000 hours of work per year (basically, 5 days a week for 50 weeks), this comes to $30*2000 = $60,000.... awfully close to his estimate of $1,000 per week for a person working alone.

cabacon 16y ago
There's a used book sale I know about that charges a fee on the first day of the sale, and is free thereafter. It's basically a tax on the resellers, who all want to get access to the mis-priced books. If you go to used book sales, you're more likely to go on the free days, and hence won't see the resellers.
lsc 16y ago
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.)
- epochwolf 16y ago
  The database is stored locally on his pda so there are limits to just how slow it will get.
  - 16y ago

jonpaul 16y ago

$1000 a week? That's it? Yes, I know that you can make a decent living on that (in the Midwest)... but for what? Would you truly be happy doing that? It just seems like a lot of busy work with little long-term return. Most software devs make much more than that. I guess I'm not really keen on the idea of trading hours for dollars. To each their own I guess.

eru 16y ago
You don't need any education, and not much enterprising spirit to do the book thing. It's not a line of work that competes with developing software.

kujawa 16y ago

This kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Ninth Gate, a rather under-appreciated Johnny Depp movie from about 10 years ago. Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.

eru 16y ago
She reads "How to win friends and influence people" on the train.

shalmanese 16y ago

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?

edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do <50% of their business through the door. They make their money on Amazon, others don't even bother with the store anymore - they buy job lots of books put them in cheap warehouse space and sell them for 1c making money on the s+h This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers isn't really to invest $1000s in high tech to make a little more money.
- eru 16y ago
  The library should give the scanners to the old ladies, then.
  - edfrtghjkjh 16y ago
    Presumably the library already has the ISBN of the books it is getting rid of. They could pull out the ones worth >$1 after checking on Amazon and then package and ship them - but thats probably not cost effective for a library employee and getting little old ladies to spend the day packaging and shipping isn't what they volunteered for. They could get in some minimum wage temp labor to do this once a year - but that's not really the libraries core business. It would be like having police patrol cars pick up cans by the side of the freeway for the 5c recycling (now theres a business model)
- bluesnowmonkey 16y ago
  Sounds like a business opportunity. If someone wants to sell a bunch of books, they hire you to come scan it for valuable ones, sell them on Amazon and split the revenue. Then they can donate the rest or sell them for 50c. It benefits the seller, because they get into the Amazon market without investing in learning/equipment. It benefits you the arbiter because you get exclusive rights to the books, shutting out your competitors.

Tichy 16y ago

For ages I have dreamed about a service where shoppers could visit flea markets and do an immediate auction if they find something of value. There would be a live stream of "interesting" items on the site, and anybody who wants to buy could immediately connect to the shopper to make him buy the item. I guess there were too many problems with this model, and I didn't expect high interest (I was more in love with it from a tech angle, doing stuff with phones...). But I just realized that this book scanning business is actually a viable subset of that idea. If image recognition was better, it could also work for other items besides books. (Perhaps image recognition technology is actually good enough by now).

vdoma 16y ago

I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be, and head out. My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed. Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices at these sales.

johnwatson11218 16y ago

This year at the Phoenix Book Fair (http://www.vnsabooksale.org/ http://www.vnsabooksale.org/) there was an incident where 2 people who were in line when the doors opened got into a fight. Apparently both men had scanners and shopping carts and were scanning books for the same reason listed in the article. One of the men began reaching into the other's basket to scan his items and that is when the fight began. I think they were just grabbing handfuls of books and putting them in their basket and then starting to scan to see what to keep. I spoke with one of the organizers and she told me that she goes and sorts books twice a week at their warehouse. It is all volunteer work ... but it got me thinking that you could earn extra income by bringing a scanner. Although in this case it might be better to just alert the charity running the book sale of the item's value.

tjr 16y ago

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 sorting through what I had brought in, they offered me $13.50 for both boxes, which I gladly accepted. (My goal was clutter reduction, not profit.) A few hours later, they called me on the phone and said that they discovered one of the books I brought was more valuable than they first thought, and wanted to give me an extra $9.50. I found that refreshingly honest of them.

johnwatson11218 16y ago
Used book stores have a hard time figuring out how much math and computer books are worth. It seems like it was easier to sell them in the early 90s. Later there were so many new books being published during the dot com boom that most stores stopped accepting them. The books were becoming obsolete too quickly. The best used book store for tech books that I have ever seen is http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks http://www.powells.com/technicalbooks It is my understanding that they buy technical books only on certain days when they can have local grad students come in and do the appraisals.
- davidw 16y ago
  Powell's technical is a fantastic place. Anyone who goes through Portland should visit both Powell's and Powell's technical, which is a distinct store about a block away.
angusgr 16y ago
I have a vaguely similar story. A few years ago my parents found a box of Apple II books from when I was a kid. I saved a few favourites (my extremely-worn AppleSoft Basic reference manual, and a great circuit-level description of the entire Apple I system.) What to do with the rest? I spent 4 years working at a second hand bookstore, and I knew that computer books were generally treated as unsellable. Especially old ones. So I put the box on ebay for $1, with a full list of the books inside. Knowing that this way a wide audience would see them, and presumably I would reach a vintage computer enthusiast who would come, pick them up, and take them away. I wasn't looking to make money, I figured $10 or so would be the price - and a guarantee that the person actually wanted the books. The box sold for close to $300. The winning bidder was after a ProDOS reference book that I barely realised I even had. I have no idea what the second bidder was after.

lsc 16y ago

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 think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of quality. It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks. Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix. It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books (which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks. my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to pick through the mess.) I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.

orenmazor 16y ago
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.

asmithmd1 16y ago

If the goal of sales that ban scanners is to get the book into the hands of someone who wants to read it they could do what the Baltimore Book Thing does when they give away free books -- stamp the title page as a free book, not for resale. Kind of like the viral effect of GPL. Once a book has been through the Baltimore Book thing's hands it is always free http://www.bookthing.org http://www.bookthing.org

angusgr 16y ago
This is an admirable idea, but I can't help but think of the number of CDs I've bought at used record stores with "Not For Resale" stickers still affixed. Label review samples that had gone into the second hand channel just fine. Also I know from experience that used book sellers will often quite happily clip or black out portions of the frontispiece or half-title page if they need/want to. Collectible book dealers are also quite happy selling galley proofs of classic books, in fact some people collect them. They're also usually marked "not for sale".
- ryanpetrich 16y ago
  I think the first-sale doctrine might make that sticker a mere suggestion.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    If the copy was acquired through some private, contracted method the first-sale doctrine might not apply. For example, if you're given a private review copy of a book under a no-sale contract that you agree to, that's enforceable, at least in theory, and the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply. However it's pretty hard to police, and almost all the policing effort that anybody does expend is pre-release, to try to track down people trying to sell review copies on eBay before the street date; nobody spends much effort tracking down people who then sold those review copies 5 years later.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  Last year I bought a used book through Amazon, that upon arrival turned out to be a galley proof. I was a little annoyed that it hadn't been marked as such, but I kind of thought that it might be collectible in some way.

Jun8 16y ago

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!

stevoski 16y ago
Sure you have access to these second-hand books - at the going market rate on Amazon.
- Jun8 16y ago
  Let me explain more clearly (i) they quickly hoard together good books at the sale, cutting off access to other prospective buyers on location, like me, (ii) they buy a very small percentage of the books they hoard (guy in the OP says 1 in 30), the others books are just left in an unordered pile, so it's hard for other people to find them, and finally (iii) they create a mess for the sale organizers, I've heard many organizers complain about them and some sales won't let them in. It's like a guy who runs in a cafeteria, gets all the good desserts and then tries to sell them to you.
  - roel_v 16y ago
    Well sounds like the people organizing the book sale are doing a bad job keeping their patrons in check, then. No matter where you go, there are always going to be assholes. I have friend & family who own bars & restaurants - I can tell you that a guy trying to monopolize the dessert buffet and causing annoyance to the other guests is going to find himself outside on the pavement real quick.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
trop 16y ago
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.

stevoski 16y ago

On a voluntary, part-time basis, I used to run a second-hand store for my church. A good part of our sales were to second-hand book stores, second-hand furniture stores, second-hand CD stores, and second-hand (read: retro/vintage) clothing stores. I loved these customers - they came reliably and almost always bought something. They didn't haggle, and didn't ask for credit or for things to be held for them. The guy who wrote this Slate article is doing a similar thing - being a regular purchasing customer of the places he frequents.

jdoliner 16y ago

While this arbitrage is fun and makes you feel very clever (as arbitrage almost always does). I'm not sure why this is framed as "Confessions." The author pretends this is some affront to books but books are one of the earliest mass produced commodities in existence (perhaps the earliest), this ease of redistribution is really one of the most important features of books.

angusgr 16y ago

Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought might be valuable. I think, especially at that time (2001-2004), the internet was inflating rather than devaluing used book prices in Australia. The strangest people are dealers/collectors who would spend hours of their saturday in the store, eventually buying a cheap book so they could smugly inform you, the seller, that it was a collectible edition, worth much more than they paid. Or that they would be swapping the dust jacket from this copy onto their copy, thereby improving its condition, even though this jacket was from the second printing not the first. Or dozens of other strange obscure tricks. Those are the people who don't need scanners, and presumably would resent them as a poor substitute for their encyclopedic knowledge.

lionhearted 16y ago

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 profit. This is crazy to me - the guy's making by his own numbers $4000 per month for 80 hour workweeks and amazing customer service, and he's making 10,000+ titles available online that might otherwise not be. If I ever see someone with the book scanner thing, I'm going to thank them and tell them I think they're doing a great thing for the world.

gjm11 16y ago
> 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 be treated with reverence, bought and sold by people who love them, etc. But I don't see anyone saying "He's making a profit, and that's bad". As to whether what he's doing is, on balance, beneficial or harmful, I don't think we have enough information to know for sure. Scenario 1. A small minority of particularly good used-book shops, which would otherwise have had real trouble selling their merchandise, are visited by people like this; the result is that lots of books from their shelves are made available to people who want them, and that the booksellers stay in business. Everyone wins. Scenario 2. All the world's used-book shops are deluged with people like this. As soon as any new books arrive they pounce on them. The result is that all the books anyone wants are sold at higher prices, reducing their availability to people with less money; and that the used-book shops no longer get any "normal" customers because most of the interesting books disappear as soon as they hit the shelves, and that after a while the booksellers give up in disgust. Everyone loses. Presumably the truth is somewhere in between. I'd guess it's much closer to Scenario 1. But fearing Scenario 2 isn't really all that crazy.
- 16y ago

waivej 16y ago

To me he seemed like a primitive cyborg. I'm having fun imagining what we'll see in 20-30 years. Also it's the hidden the gold makes panning fun. These guys are using fancy tools to strip it out and leave thrift stores with piles of leftover dirt.

klbarry 16y ago

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.

Dove 16y ago

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.

latch 16y ago

Enjoyed this a lot. Its a great story that stands on its own. Having said that, a part of me wants more details about the business...avg/min/max markup, avg/min/max time to resell, insurance cost (if any), markup on shipping. % of online business (or is 100% amazon (probably))....

cjy 16y ago

I can totally relate to this article. My college library would sell books it got from estate sales but didn't want. I would hang out in the library with my laptop looking up ISBNs on amazon. I found a few gems and sold a cake decorating handbook for $150. I can identify with the feeling of shame. I think it is a noble job, but something felt wrong about skimming books only for their monetary value. It was an irrational emotion, but it was hard to shake.

maurits 16y ago

This reminds me a bit of high frequency trading. He is fast, thrives on market inefficiencies and is somewhat frowned upon.

Tichy 16y ago

What makes traditional barcode scanners so much more efficient than smartphone cameras? Any chance to catch up on speed?

roel_v 16y ago

Maybe there's money to be made here in an automated way (call it the HFT of the used-book markets). I was looking for the Graphics Gems series on Amazon & Abebooks the other day, and the cheapest ones went for 1-4 dollars, while the expensive ones went for 40-60 dollars (not sure if they're getting sold at that price, but it's the asking price). If one would scan these sits and identify wide spreads, one could buy up the inventory at the bottom of the market and re-list at market price. Maybe one could deal with the transaction costs (S&H) by agreeing on bulk shipping or so, or letting sellers ship directly to the end-customer if one can be found within a week or two (agree with the seller that they keep the book in inventory for two weeks, if you find a seller within that time have it shipped directly, otherwise to your own storage).

lelele 16y ago

> We were in the library's book-sale room when I overheard him telling his friend that the two of them were surrounded by assholes—that is, the people scanning. Just a competitor feeling the heat ;-)

lukev 16y ago

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.

burnout1540 16y ago

I have some confessions to make too. I did what this guy did but in a much more automated, scalable fashion. I did online book marketplace arbitrage. Basically, I wrote software to automatically find books for sale on one used book site on the web and listed the same book for sale (with a markup) on another site. If my listing was purchased, my software would automatically purchase the book from the original seller and have it shipped directly to my buyer. In the second half of 2007 I did over $200K in sales and had 10s of thousands of books listed for sale at a time. If anyone has any interest, I might write a blog post about it.

maxawaytoolong 16y ago
Out of $200K in sales, what was your take home?
- burnout1540 16y ago
  About $50K. It was still ramping up at the time though and I am aware of people doing the same thing who, I believe, are easily making $1M+.

noverloop 16y ago

Arbitrage in action