1 Mar
2016
1 Mar
'16
5:40 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:11 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
On 2016-Mar-01, at 4:36 PM, Sean Conner wrote:
greed.
On abebooks.com, the lowest price is right around $100 with shipping. Yes,
this sucks. Yes, this is how capitalism works. :-) I've paid serious
money for books that are relevant to my research that aren't available in
libraries - one of them was no closer than Paris. (I bought it from India
for about $50, and I won't loan it out.)
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
It was thus said that the Great Rich Alderson
once stated:
>
> For most hobbyists, even $100 is too much. I was simply astounded at
the
chutzpah
of the seller--right there on the Amazon list--who was asking
nearly $1500 for a copy.
I think that comes from an unchecked computer algorithm, not simple I think what's happening here is someone
(some Amazon third party)
offered
the book for, say, $5. Another third party scans
Amazon for such books,
and
offers it for say, $6, with the hope that you
(the potential buyer) will
only see their their offer for $6 and buy from them, at which point they
will buy it for $5 from the original seller, sell it to you for $6 and
pocket the $1 profit. The problem comes when a third third-party seller
sees the offer for $6 and does the same thing as the second one, only now
they're offering it for $7, will pay $6 for it and pocket $1 profit.
Keep repeating that process and you end up with books selling for $1500.
-spc (Who knows? If you keep searching, you might find the original
seller selling it for $5 ... )
For example:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/why-did-amazon-charge-23698655-93-fo…
I've come across other articles about this in the past. Don't know the
specifics of the book mentioned by Rich.