Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback

It is more than likely the repricer. Amazon will remove prices eventually. The reason nobody catches these is that they are slow moving books. We used to only clean them up once a week sometimes as much as once a month. It happens with all the repricing software. Some are better than others and you can always add caps. I think our cap was $4000. You have to set the cap that high because there are certain architectural, medical, and occasionally historical texts or sets that will run this high. ...and books are a volume game. The more you process the more you sell.

Software generally used... Monsoon Fillz SellerCentral NeatoScan Thrift books (close to the largest is primarily in house software).

When I worked there we ran close to 120k skus (sku = ean, condition combo). We were not the largest but, for a time in the top 10% of third party new and used book sellers. We got our books from remainders, closeouts, and auction. Most of the time we could process ~15-25 pallets/gaylords of books per week.

It's a repricing issue that no one has caught yet because it's a crappy title and no one is worried about losing a sale. Titles with a rank of < 10k are monitored daily for mispricing issues. Other than that...scan more books, get them listed, it's all about the numbers.

Isn't this a known method of money laundering?

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.

I occasionally look to see if there are any hardcover copies of The Art of the Metaobject Protocol up for sale, one appeared and is still listed at a little over $11k. I even messaged the seller at one point around 11:30pm about it (I'd buy it if it were a couple orders of magnitude cheaper...) and somewhat surprisingly they got back to me within the hour to inform me that "there is a listing error while pricing the book. However, we already informed our listing team to rectify the mistake as soon as possible." Given the other comment here on how teams clean them up ~once a month, I guess we'll see in August if it's still there and at that price or not...

The old world of warcraft auction house method, post something extremely high and hope someone mistakenly buys it.

Profit.

i've read about this phenomenon before. speculation was that many/most prices are set automatically, and that these absurd prices were somehow attempts to manipulate other prices.

money laundering also seems like a good explanation.

At that price, better to buy a stamp and write the author directly, including a check big enough to cover hardcover list price, plus postage. They might have an extra copy in a box in storage somewhere, and they might even sign it for you.

I'd be afraid that if I ordered the conspicuously expensive one, it would show up hollowed out and filled with dirty fentanyl-heroin, or the book is utterly normal, and the seller is a money launderer that now has my home shipping address.

My experience as a developer tells me that this was somebody trying to test something in production, while forgetting to de-list the book sku first.