BookFinder.com Journal

With all due respect, I think you have misinterpreted my words. My first post was a reply to "anonymous" who seemed to imply there was something wrong with a recently-published book being priced at $100. It helps to read the thread in context. Unless I have grossly misread your original post, it appears you are implying that as well. My point was that there is nothing wrong with a book being priced at $100. If the book is scarce and desired, that is a perfectly reasonable price. The man in the story was lucky to find it, and would never have found it at all without the aid of online searching.

You state:

"If a seller in Puerto Ricos selling an out of print book for $2 at the same time that a seller in New York is listing it for $100, believing it to be the only copy for sale, that suggests that the New York sellers assessment of rarity was wrong, and that the Puerto Rican seller had no idea that the book was rare."

That is a self-contradicting assessment. As the original story states that the few available copies were all priced *above* $100, it seems simply that the Puerto Rican seller simply didn't know what he had.

(As a side note, it should also be mentioned that the original Jupiter Research blog from which the story is extracted is pretty much a marketing ploy to sell their "research" products).

GOOGLE! Oh for Cripe sake!

Look, the Library of Congress can't even BEGIN to catalog the mass volume of material that is published every year, and their cataloging backlog is ridiculous - like over 100 million items. Google's claim they will "digitize everything" is just one more grandiose view by the tech world toward the information universe. There are too many barriers in the way, copyright among them, but in the end, the major hurdle they will never clear is sheer volume.

It ain't gonna happen. Every time I read about it, I just laugh.

Of course, I'm a librarian who has spent a career attempting to simply keep up with published material. And I'm a book dealer who dances one step ahead of those who truly do damage to the book trade in their quest to bring everyone every book for a dollar. Again, it ain't gonna happen, because there will always be those books out there that some odd person is going to want, and that not many people know or care about. Our job in the rare book business is to recognize that kind of material when we see it, and catalog it for sale.

My 2 cents.

Steve

I am a professional booksearcher and use Bookfinder & Abe a great deal. I never fail to be amazed by the number of books that I haven't been able to find after several years of searching, titles such as Blagg & King: Military and Civilian in Roman Britain (Oxford 1984) or Underhill: Global Capital Markets and EU Financial Integration (Warwick 1995).

These two were requested more than FIVE YEARS ago, and still no sign on the net. We are a very, very long way from having most books available for purchase online indeed!

I use Bookfinder regularly, and glad for the chance. I just wanted to point out that what collectors have the least of and need the most is self-control. Bookfinder could make available every single book for sale in every single online bookstore on the planet, and people would still buy higher-priced things unnecessarily.

The "war on rarity" is like declaring a "war on evil." If you win, or even only to whatever extent you win, inflation will hit. Human perception will skew to create new rarities and new evils.

Re: $100 book
Yeah, I do think there is something wrong with that price. Let me give you an example. I bought a bunch of books for 20 cents each a couple of days ago. Does this mean that a copy of "Far from the maddening crowd" or "A tale of two cities" in new condition is worth only 20 cents? No, it just means I got a decent deal. (I realize those books are not at all rare.) Maybe some sellers are willing to buy the Card Captor book for $100. Does this mean it is worth $100? No, it's only worth $100 to a small number of people willing to pay that much. My point is that books are not bought and sold on a perfectly efficient market. If they were, I think the price would be much lower than $100. As bookfinder improves, a segment of the market becomes more efficient. (But even if bookfinder were doing a perfect job in listing all for-sale books, there would be thousands of people unaware of the fact that they could make a profit by selling their copy of the Card Captor Sakura book.)

I think that services like Bookfinder should eventually help to level the far too often inflated prices charged by "rare-book" dealers.
Why do sellers think that pricing their copy at $149.50 while a competitor has it at $150 will make much of a difference? Sensible buyers will remain only lurkers, and never will take that bait. It seems that greed and not a wish to actually sell the copy keeps the book posted without a sale ever made.

I have watched for years via Bookfinder a few titles I desire that are all but impossible to find remain listed for hundreds of dollars and therefore languish unsold. Despite their rarity, no foolish buyer seems to have decided to pay the outlandish price asked. I know that for a couple of these, I have talked to others (scholars in these cases) who also would love to obtain said copy, but we agree that at the prices posted, the amounts are ridiculously inflated. Not all who desire a book are wealthy; many of us are, as in my case, underpaid teachers and the like who feel cheated out of gaining titles that we truly would cherish, as well as often promote by our own advocacy by scholarship or word-of-mouth or in the classroom.

Yet even on these pages, defenders of rare-book dealers claim such bloated prices are necessary to pay the bills and justify the expense of obtaining such scarce titles. Yes, but how will their bills be met if via Bookfinder all can see that their price remains too high?

In the past, pre-Net, I might have paid the high cost if I had stumbled upon a desired title in a store. You never knew how common or uncommon certain books were among sellers, or how fair the prices were, unless you had many catalogues or stores to physically compare.

Now, I will not pay a high price. I make a mental note of the price in the store, and go home to Bookfinder. I want to compare, as is now possible, the prices with those of competitors. No longer can we be ripped-off.

I wonder why sellers keep prices so high? They'll never move merchandise. Sellers compete via Bookfinder, but often peddle their rare titles in a miserly manner. Their prices as posted on Bookseller often cluster at some elevated level within a few dollars or cents of each other, as if these piddling differences on titles priced in triple digits would compel a heretofore impecunious buyer to pay up.

If a seller would cut the price in half, say, then I might consider realistically making the investment in the title. That book would not sit another decade on the seller's shelf. But instead, these rare books often remain at sky-high prices, profiting neither seller nor buyer, as the seller and buyer remain only theoretical.

Those of us who survive as full-time bookdealers (with no other source of income) are all too well aware that book (asking)prices need to be pitched at a level which will not deter a serious would-be buyer, accepting the fact that a book's value is often determined by its long-term value, its condition, the likelihood of any reprints, the accuracy of data contained within the book and the expertise and collectability of the author. Bookselling is not learnt except by hands on experience : the internet has created a whole new sub-structure where the inhabitants expect to piggy-back on the "findings" of their "elder" peers.

Many long-experienced booksellers are now turning their back on the internet as a serious sales medium. The established olde worlde booktrade is well aware that true scarcity means that there are only a finite numbers of copies of some titles available at any time, and in increasingly wealth driven world economies the value, and hence price, of truly scare titles is going to increase just as rapidly as the dreck titles are going to flow to the shredder.

If anybody believes that all there is to bookselling or book marketing is to price compare a title on a meta-comparison website then they are at the potty-training stage of their life within the bookworld : few such disciples will ever get out of diapers.

Clive Keeble

When you are dealing with uncommon, but not truly collectable books, how do you set a price? A couple of decades ago a woman I knew self-published a book of her dense (not to say incomprehensible) poetry in an edition of 250 copies. This was her only publication. I lost track of her, but when online bookselling began I started checking to see if any copies of this book were for sale or if she had ever published anything else. Eventually a bookseller put a copy of her book on sale for $15. Over time other copies were offered and now there are 5 for sale, all for between $12.50 and $15. No copy has ever sold. So the "market" has set a price, even though no one wants to buy.

Another story: I wanted a book put out by a small scholarly publisher. It was in print, but it cost about $100, far more than I was willing to pay. I saw a used copy for sale for $15 online and snapped it up (this was the only used copy for sale at that time). For some reason a day or two later I checked online again and discovered that a different bookseller had a copy for sale for $45. I assume he must have waited for the $15 copy to sell before putting his own copy online (where it became the only used copy for sale).

>Maybe some sellers (sic) are willing to buy the >Card Captor book for $100. Does this mean it is >worth $100?

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

>In the past, pre-Net, I might have paid the high >cost... Now, I will not pay a high price.

Even if it is the same book, you want it, and it is scarce? That is strange.

>a woman I knew self-published a book of her dense >(not to say incomprehensible) poetry

Well, there's your answer.