5 ms·

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 a

by 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.
  - jcl 16y ago
    I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their prices.
    - lsc 16y ago
      the amazon XML api is really nice - it was my primary tool when I was working in that space north of five years ago. I don't know what this guy did, but what I did (and this would become more useful if I had more clients than just me) was that I cached the data for a certain period of time... so the first time I asked for it within a certain time period it'd actually ask, the second or third time it'd hit a cache. Now, if I was making software for other people to do this, and I had a bunch of guys like this one using my software to search for books, assuming it went through my db before amazon's, you'd build up a pretty large cache. Of course, if you could somehow arrange for the whole damn thing to be available offline, that'd be even better, but I don't know how amazon would feel about it. When I was doing it, there were rate-limiting things preventing me; but if you are bigger, there's really no reason for amazon to not give you the data if you are willing to pay for it or what have you; this product is ultimately helpful to amazon.com as a merchant.

by aed 16y ago

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.
- jcl 16y ago
  I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their prices.
  - lsc 16y ago
    the amazon XML api is really nice - it was my primary tool when I was working in that space north of five years ago. I don't know what this guy did, but what I did (and this would become more useful if I had more clients than just me) was that I cached the data for a certain period of time... so the first time I asked for it within a certain time period it'd actually ask, the second or third time it'd hit a cache. Now, if I was making software for other people to do this, and I had a bunch of guys like this one using my software to search for books, assuming it went through my db before amazon's, you'd build up a pretty large cache. Of course, if you could somehow arrange for the whole damn thing to be available offline, that'd be even better, but I don't know how amazon would feel about it. When I was doing it, there were rate-limiting things preventing me; but if you are bigger, there's really no reason for amazon to not give you the data if you are willing to pay for it or what have you; this product is ultimately helpful to amazon.com as a merchant.