On Feb 10, 8:40 am, "my-wings" wrote:
"Stone Mirror (the Great and Terrible)" wrote in
ooglegroups.com...
I own a pristine copy of a volume titled "The Picatrix", published by
Ourobouros Press in 2001 in a limited edition of 1000 copies (mine is
#331). I'm doing an appraisal of the current value of this book, so I
searched Bookfinder to see what was listed there.
There are several copies listed, ranging in price from a low of $204
to a high of over $500 (the latter from a Seattle brick and mortar
store for a copy with a scuff on the cover!) One of the outliers,
pricing a copy at $430, was an outfit called "seattle_bookseller". I
wrote and asked why the price was so high, and got an amazingly
vituperative and abusive response, stating that this "WAS HOW THE RARE
BOOK BUSINESS WORKED" and that I "NEED A COURSE IN REMEDIAL ECONOMICS"
and so on.
I was a little surprised at this, but a little research turned up the
even more surprising information that this seller is one "Luis M.
Arsupial", the same person who was doing business (kinda) as
"texas_bookseller" up until about six months ago, and who previously
created a huge stink in this group over some questionable
transactions!
This kind of pricing seems like nothing more than gouging to me. I
could buy two copies of this book for what this yoyo is asking for it.
I can only assume that he's doing business on a basis of relying on
his customers being ignorant and not doing their research. Based on
the listings on Bookfinder, I'd estimate the value of this book at
$225 to $250, certainly nowhere close to $430.
Is this a usual practice? Do a lot of booksellers price their wares in
the hopes that their buyers will be too stupid to know that they're
being asked to pay twice what a book is worth?
(Apparently this "Luis M. Arsupial"--"marsupial"...?--was once known
as "Jason Christopher Hughes", a name which turns up a wide variety of
odd and amazing postings on USENET...)
I remember some sort of hoo-haa over "Luis M. Arsupial" but forget the
details, so my comments are general.
First: Good for you for doing your homework! The first rule of internet book
buying is "buyer beware".
Second: While the seller's response to you was over the top and
unprofessional, it's hard to know by how much without knowing how your
inquiry was phrased. Did you say: "I collect this author and I'd be happy to
know if you've got something special I haven't seen before that would make
your book worth more than most of the others I've seen"? Or did you say:
"You are a price gouger and a thief who preys on the ignorant and unwary.
Why are you charging so much?"?
Again, I'm ignoring whatever reputation the seller has already acquired.
Just talking in general.
One possibility is that the seller doesn't even own the book. That happened
to me not too long ago. I sold one to another seller who asked me to drop
ship the book. When I looked at his web site, he had copied my description
lock, stock, and barrel and upped my price by a third.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that that's what's really happening with your
seattle_bookseller. He finds books worth a few hundred dollars, prices his
copy a bit below the top, and plans on buying one of the lower priced books
if he has to fulfill the order. What could be better? Somebody else buys and
stocks the book, and it doesn't cost him a cent until he gets the order.
Again, just speculation, but that's my first guess.
All that said, basically used books are worth exactly what some one will pay
for them. The internet has been a great leveler as far as pricing, because
most people, even with a simple Google search, can do exactly what you did
and get the range of prices available. In the "old days", books moved much
differently. Sellers had shops, and priced for their geographic areas and
their specialty. A book that was priced at $12 in one shop could bring $50
or $200 when moved to a dealer who had the right clients for it. Sales from
dealer to dealer were a much bigger part of the trade. It was understood
that part of the value a dealer added to a book was his knowledge of the
collecting area and years of cultivating the kind of customers who would
want that kind of book.
So...your seller may indeed be a sleaze-bag. I would certainly never buy
from him based on the unprofessional response he made to you. But if he's
got the book and he wants to list it at $400+ when most copies are in the
$200-range, so what? Maybe his policy is to never revise a listing, and he's
just waiting for the market to catch up with him! You don't have to buy the
book, and he doesn't have to justify his price to you, unless he's got a
really good story that truly makes the book worth what he's charging.
Not that I think it's necessarily right for a dealer to charge any price at
all. I've seen some things that would simply embarrass me to be involved
with. There was an auction on eBay two weeks ago where a seller paired two
common $25 books, hyped the illustrator and sold the pair for over $200. And
a copycat did the same thing with the same titles and netted over $100.
Again, nobody made any of the customers bid on the auctions, and the books
were started at a very reasonable price, but seeing the final values, I just
cringed. I would hate to be either of those sellers when their customers
found out they could have gotten the same books for a quarter or half the
price on amazon.
And that, my friend, is why serious collectors often support specific
sellers over a period of years, even if it means they pay a small premium in
the pricing over what the same titles in the same condition would bring in
other venues. They do it because they know they can trust the seller to
accurately describe the books, to stand behind their products, and to price
fairly, even if not at the cheapest price.
Alice
--
Book collecting terms illustrated. Occasional books for sale.http://www.mywingsbooks.com/
Just keep coughing up more evidence of your stalking behavior, David
Schlesinger of ACCESS Linux. It is piling up in a nice, fat report
for the police and for your current employer.
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8...atform-shown-a...
Windowing system?
cervezas @ 4/4/2006 3:07:48 PM #
With regard to X Windows they're still not saying for now, as of
recent conversations I've had with David Schlesinger.
David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
Software Everywhere blog
www.pikesoft.com/blog
Informa Open Source in Mobile Conference
Nov. 7-8, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
PalmSource is a sponsor and will be exhibiting ALP. Mike Kelley,
Senior Vice President of Engineering, is speaking. David ("Lefty")
Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies, will be
participating on a panel.
PalmSource clarifies our coverage of Palm OS and ALP
By David Gewirtz
Over the past few weeks, we've been covering the changes in the Palm
OS and its apparent eventual migration into something called ALP. As
is always the case when trying to understand something new and
relatively poorly documented, we got some of our facts wrong.
Fortunately, we've gotten some excellent clarification on ALP from two
PalmSource executives who would know: Maureen O'Connell, Senior
Director, Corporate Communications and David "Lefty" Schlesinger,
Director, Core Tools and Technologies.
"It's not particularly our intention that MAX 'inherit much of the
traditional look and feel of the Palm OS'..."
These two comments provide some excellent clues about what we might
expect in the future from PalmSource.
Clarications from Maureen O'Connell, Senior Director, Corporate
Communications
In your recently published article, "The future of the Palm platform:
rosy or uncertain," you claimed it had been confirmed that the ACCESS
Linux Platform is based "on Wind River's Platform For Consumer
Devices, Linux Edition."
I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that the ACCESS Linux
Platform, recently announced by ACCESS Co., Ltd., and its wholly-owned
subsidiary, PalmSource, has been designed to be kernel agnostic and
does not rely on unique features of any specific Linux distribution.
It is based on a standard version 2.6.12 (and above) kernel.
http://www.computingunplugged.com/is...001734001.html