R. Totale wrote:

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:29:37 GMT, "foad" wrote:


"R. Totale" wrote in message
. ..

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:21:02 GMT, "foad" wrote:


"R. Totale" wrote in message
m...

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:21:05 -0800 (PST), David Downing
wrote:


I'm looking to sell them for
as much as they're worth. Can somebody tell me what a good website
woulld be for this?

eBay. Start them at 99 cents. They will sell for as much as someone is
willing to pay you for them, and that's how much they are worth.

Wow that's stupid.

How do you figure? Auctions have been used for hundreds of years to
sell items from thimbles to mansions for exactly what they're worth
(at that particular moment in time). How better to determine what
something is worth? A firm cash offer beats speculation, guesses and
opinion every time.

That's very postmodern.

Ebay will tell you the minimum price that the 24 people who are searching
for a particular item in a particular week are willing to pay for it.


As well as the maximum, which is what it's worth.



I don't see Bauman's Rare Books selling their stuff on eBay. There are many
kinds of markets for many purposes. An auction market is fine for certain types
of fungible goods, provided that enough people know to look there, as with the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for instance. But the more unique goods are, the
more you generally need time to sell them. For that, a Bauman's is ideal. They
have a web site and a place of busines. An exception would be the
well-publicized (internationally, that is) auction of a rare work of art. I was
just listening to NPR about the planned auction of a rare (700+ yr old) copy of
the Magna Carta. It is being advertized world wide. It is the only copy likely
to come up for sale in the lives of anyone interested. These circumstances make
it suitable for that special kind of auction. But, you would not sell it on
eBay. The mechanism of eBay is not suitable for such an item. The clock
ticking limits prices on the high end. Retail stores are best for goods that
need to be compared (televisions, for instance). The complexity of our markets
reflects the complexity of types of goods, ways of investigation, social
circumstances. you wouldn't sell the latest Harry Potter on eBay when a fixed
price (more or less) at your nearest Border's gets it to your customer base on
Day 1. Besides, the publishers would want to control the price and on eBay it
could slip below what is acceptable to them.


Francis A. Miniter