On Saturday, November 2, 2013 5:36:43 PM UTC-4, wrote:

Amusingly oversimplified. You can, in fact, find very good prices by reading ABEbooks carefully, and you will find outlandish figures at eBay. It's not easy to tell if a given book sells via ABE, but you *can* put an item into your watch list at eBay, and see how the seller made out.

Well yes. I was going to favor Mr James with an extended essay ** on the dead hobby of book collecting in the dead medium of usenet, but as usual went for the cheap laughs instead.

I use ABE solely as a reference to determine whether a particular book or edition is scarce or might be valuable for other reasons. I have neither the time nor inclination to sort through 100s of individual listings and dealers to determine which of them are insane and which pricing their items rationally. Based on his posting I suspect Mr James of the same lassitude.

On ebay you can sort searches by completed listings and sold items. There's no need to resort to a watch list.

** With footnotes