"Tom Swift Home Page" wrote:

wrote in message
...

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.

The used book business was fundamentally changed with the advent of wide
Internet use and, of course, eBay.
Gone are the days of the misanthropic crotchety old book dealer demanding
exorbitant prices for his not-so-rare book.
Used book shop dropped like flies over the last 15-20 years.
I miss browsing thru them but I like the low prices on the net more.

Low prices aren't caused by closing of bookstores but the
opposite, by reducing competition: it is trivial to find a
used unloved book in a bookstore cheaper than on the internet.
The internet means I buy books that I wouldn't have bought
before because I didn't know they existed or were available.