Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
slate.com
slate.com
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.
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.
Having worked in a high-end, selective used bookshop, there is a lot of arbitrage and upselling and in many cases it is worth it. It costs money to cull the good stock and resell it. You're also correct about market: one of my fave bookshops is a converted barn and the front foyer is often full of books from broken up libraries which were brought direct from an estate and not sold at the auction.
As for the fellow at the library, I can understand how a retiree, able to exchange time for lower prices, might be annoyed.
Merchants could seize the opportunity here - if your store is full of resellers rather than the public, it's time to up YOUR game and start charging more for your used books.
The way to prevent resellers from picking through your inventory for arbitrage is to correctly price your books from the start. With accurate pricing you can still undercut resellers and not make each book a commodity -- Resellers incur a multitude of costs: time, shipping, 15% amazon fee, etc. If you raise your prices to resaleValueOfBook - resellerCharges + $0.01, you cut out the combing by resellers and still offer a sizable discount from Amazon.com
The book sellers are obviously missing potential revenue here. Eventually they might wise up and start doing this themselves, or maybe a startup will come along to help them with this, cutting guys like this out.
So... consider him a saint all you'd like, but he is not helping you in the way you imagine he is.
All he's doing is going to thrift shops, and ensuring that poor people don't get any of the popular books at below market prices. Nothing saintly about that, IMO.
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.
The best used book store for tech books that I have ever seen is 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.
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.
(I helped to start a half-price book store, just curious if it's the company I used to work for)
edit: awful website, neat technology behind the store though.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Shredding your books is not doing anyone any good.
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.
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.
I've also donated a lot of used technical books to thrift stores and library sales, and if they're picked up and re-sold by guys like this that's fine by me.
Another alternative would be to sell your books on Amazon yourself, at the going rate, and then donate the proceeds to a library or other organization that has local impact.
This is easy to solve. Just start selling your book for $1 on Amazon.
If nobody else has it on amazon, this guy isn't buying it and putting it up there.
Your stated benefit doesn't exist.
TL;DR: I believe in “work smarter, not harder,” but most people I know/knew believe in the opposite.
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.
The business model of the thrift store requires treating the books as commodities ("all hardcovers $2/ea", etc.), as they don't have the volume to invest time in research. The business model of the used book seller requires knowledge, amortizing the cost of researching each book over a global (or at least national) customer base.
Adam Smith would find this a wonderful example of division of labor.
Were I in his shoes, I wouldn't just feel bad about it, I'd find it soul-destroying.
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!
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.
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.
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".
The guy who wrote this Slate article is doing a similar thing - being a regular purchasing customer of the places he frequents.
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.
It'd still be really difficult to do the true "pre ISBN" books just 'cause those are difficult to identify even with human help. often the printing/publisher/ etc... info isn't on the amazon page, and that sort of thing is huge when it comes to values.
But for the post ISBN (or the SBN? what was that called? the american book number, before it was International?) things would be much easier; yeah, you've gotta ocr a string, but with today's smartphones, that'd be pretty easy. then you just come up with a list of editions or what have you. You'd still have the problem of amazon's info about old books being not great, but you'd at least duck the problem of getting a different book with the same title (which is more common than you think.)
Really, if I were to enter that market now, I'd definitely focus on the pre-barcode books, just 'cause as far as I can tell, the software for dealing with barcodes is pretty good, and I think modern smartphones are now powerful enough to do the OCR and other stuff required to deal with that sort of thing.
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.
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.
It's like a guy who runs in a cafeteria, gets all the good desserts and then tries to sell them to you.
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.
It's not a line of work that competes with developing software.
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.
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)
Seems to work for them. How many other independent bookstores have gone under lately? When I moved out of Cambridge last year, Lorem Ipsum was just upgrading to a new, larger facility.
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.
Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.
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).
I've tried without success to convince my local Friends of the Library to sell the more profitable incoming books online themselves.
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like he has, but his own experience has taught him it's not worth the opportunity cost.
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.
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.
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))....
Just a competitor feeling the heat ;-)