
Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman - mcknz
http://www.slate.com/id/2268000/pagenum/all/
======
lionhearted
I respect this guy a lot. There's been enough times I wanted to get an obscure
out of print book and I can only find copies that cost $60 or even $200+.
Taking a book off the shelf, paying the used bookseller and freeing up their
cash/space, and stocking the inventory in his home for the whole world to be
able to buy the book online - man, the guy's almost a saint in my book.

Some people are upset he's making a profit. This is crazy to me - the guy's
making by his own numbers $4000 per month for 80 hour workweeks and amazing
customer service, and he's making 10,000+ titles available online that might
otherwise not be. If I ever see someone with the book scanner thing, I'm going
to thank them and tell them I think they're doing a great thing for the world.

~~~
gjm11
> Some people are upset he's making a profit.

Is _that_ really what "some people" are upset about? That's not the impression
I get either from the article or from comments here. Some people are upset
that he, and others like him, are making it harder or less pleasant for _them_
to buy used books. Some people are (something rather less than) upset because
what he's doing displeases them aesthetically -- books are meant to be treated
with reverence, bought and sold by people who love them, etc. But I don't see
anyone saying "He's making a profit, and that's bad".

As to whether what he's doing is, on balance, beneficial or harmful, I don't
think we have enough information to know for sure.

Scenario 1. A small minority of particularly good used-book shops, which would
otherwise have had real trouble selling their merchandise, are visited by
people like this; the result is that lots of books from their shelves are made
available to people who want them, and that the booksellers stay in business.
Everyone wins.

Scenario 2. All the world's used-book shops are deluged with people like this.
As soon as any new books arrive they pounce on them. The result is that all
the books anyone wants are sold at higher prices, reducing their availability
to people with less money; and that the used-book shops no longer get any
"normal" customers because most of the interesting books disappear as soon as
they hit the shelves, and that after a while the booksellers give up in
disgust. Everyone loses.

Presumably the truth is somewhere in between. I'd guess it's much closer to
Scenario 1. But fearing Scenario 2 isn't really all that crazy.

~~~
gregable
I doubt this guy visits used book shops. He mentions thrift shops. Used book
shops generally are quite savvy to the real value of a book in the same way
this guy is. They are profiting from the same arbitrage he is. Used book shops
have the added advantage that the original sellers often come straight to the
book shop, having never offered their books to any other market, so they can
buy without competition.

~~~
wyclif
Agreed, this guy is a thrift shopper and I feel what he is doing is legit,
he's competing at a lower level where the books are sorted to value.

Having worked in a high-end, selective used bookshop, there is a lot of
arbitrage and upselling and in many cases it is worth it. It costs money to
cull the good stock and resell it. You're also correct about market: one of my
fave bookshops is a converted barn and the front foyer is often full of books
from broken up libraries which were brought direct from an estate and not sold
at the auction.

------
tjr
Semi-related: a few days ago I took two boxes of old computer and math books
to a local Half-Price Book store. They don't usually offer a whole lot of
money for such things, and I had been thinking of donating the books to the
public library, but the library didn't seem interested in what I had. I
figured I might as well get a few dollars rather than just throw them out.

As expected, after about ten minutes of sorting through what I had brought in,
they offered me $13.50 for both boxes, which I gladly accepted. (My goal was
clutter reduction, not profit.) A few hours later, they called me on the phone
and said that they discovered one of the books I brought was more valuable
than they first thought, and wanted to give me an extra $9.50.

I found that refreshingly honest of them.

~~~
llimllib
Are you in Maryland?

(I helped to start a half-price book store, just curious if it's the company I
used to work for)

~~~
lukev
I'm in Maryland and have been having a hard time finding a good local used
bookstore. What's the name of it?

~~~
llimllib
<http://www.ukazoo.com/>

edit: awful website, neat technology behind the store though.

------
aed
This is pretty cool. In all my time going used book sales, I've never seen
anyone doing this. Maybe I just go at the wrong times.

I wonder what the economics are here. Using his setup, you can get an Axim X51
on eBay for around $100 and the scanner he uses goes for around $250 on eBay
($384 new). That's at least $350 in initial costs.

Assuming a profit of $5 per book (just a wild guess) you'd need to sell 70
books to recoup that cost. Using his ratio of 1 "buy" to every 30 "reject"
books, you'd have to go through 2,100 books to recoup your initial costs!

Taking it a step further, if you could scan three books per minute (another
wild guess), it would take 700 minutes, nearly 12 hours, of "hunting" to earn
back you startup costs.

Based on all those numbers and assumptions, your hourly earnings are roughly
$30 per hour. ($350 / 12)

Based on a standard 2,000 hours of work per year (basically, 5 days a week for
50 weeks), this comes to $30*2000 = $60,000.... awfully close to his estimate
of $1,000 per week for a person working alone.

~~~
lsc
when I was inventorying my books, my goal was five seconds to scan a book,
including dealing with the exceptions.

Laser barcode scanners are in a different league from the barcode scanners on
smartphones that decode a photo. the bottleneck is how fast you can position
the book.

(of course, in his case, he's got to wait for his thing to go look up the
price, which may take considerably more time.)

~~~
epochwolf
The database is stored locally on his pda so there are limits to just how slow
it will get.

~~~
jcl
I was wondering about that while reading the article... Does he really have a
complete Amazon book price database on his PDA? If so, how does he keep it up-
to-date? I imagine Amazon would object to someone constantly scraping their
prices.

~~~
lsc
the amazon XML api is _really nice_ \- it was my primary tool when I was
working in that space north of five years ago.

I don't know what this guy did, but what I did (and this would become more
useful if I had more clients than just me) was that I cached the data for a
certain period of time... so the first time I asked for it within a certain
time period it'd actually ask, the second or third time it'd hit a cache.

Now, if I was making software for other people to do this, and I had a bunch
of guys like this one using my software to search for books, assuming it went
through my db before amazon's, you'd build up a pretty large cache.

Of course, if you could somehow arrange for the whole damn thing to be
available offline, that'd be even better, but I don't know how amazon would
feel about it. When I was doing it, there were rate-limiting things preventing
me; but if you are bigger, there's really no reason for amazon to not give you
the data if you are willing to pay for it or what have you; this product is
ultimately helpful to amazon.com as a merchant.

------
hugh3
He never explains why he feels bad about it.

It seems like a perfectly respectable profession to me, bringing books from
ignored corners of dank bookstores to the hands of those who really want them.

~~~
edfrtghjkjh
It's actually of benefit - there is a book out there that I want but it's
hidden in a library or garage sale in a city 1000mi away. This guy makes it
available for me to buy at a price I set on Amazon - rather than the book
ending up in the trash and me not having what I want.

~~~
SageRaven
Depends on perspective, I suppose. It can be a detriment to the _local_
market.

I frequent a local thrift store (Deseret Industries, run by the LDS church),
where I always quickly scan all 6 book shelves. Every morning (that I've been
there that early), there's one dude that rushes his way to the "new" book
shelves (the ones that were just rolled out of the back and not yet sorted
onto the shelves), towing a cart, and he proceeds to monopolize the shelves as
he roots through all the books and searches them manually on his phone (which
I assume it internet-enabled).

I can't help but get a little annoyed by his presence, especially once I
figured out what he was doing. He wasn't reading all those books, of course;
he was hoping to make a profit on them. I, like many others, look for books
to, you know, actually _read_ , and I view this man's actions as rude.
Likewise, when I offload a box or two of books to this same store, I am doing
so out of a desire to give back to the local community, and it kind of chaps
my hide that this asshat with his phone might buy one of my tech-related
softbacks for $1 and sell it on Amazon for $5 or more, potentially denying
some poor, local kid who may want to better himself by stumbling on that same
book I donated.

These days, because of this leech at the thrift store, I'm more inclined to
simply shred my books (they make good animal bedding and compost well) than
take the effort to load them up into the car and donate them. Sure, that may
be viewed as somewhat selfish, but then again, that's exactly how I view that
guy who buys all the books to make a quick buck.

~~~
Tichy
If you are concerned about that, why not donate one of those book scanner
thingies to the thrift store. Then they can set the prices accordingly, and
become uninteresting to the book scanners.

~~~
chwahoo
I suspect the thrift store would need to sell on Amazon, with its broader
customer base, in order to support itself with higher prices.

Another alternative would be to sell your books on Amazon yourself, at the
going rate, and then donate the proceeds to a library or other organization
that has local impact.

------
johnwatson11218
This year at the Phoenix Book Fair (<http://www.vnsabooksale.org/>) there was
an incident where 2 people who were in line when the doors opened got into a
fight. Apparently both men had scanners and shopping carts and were scanning
books for the same reason listed in the article. One of the men began reaching
into the other's basket to scan his items and that is when the fight began. I
think they were just grabbing handfuls of books and putting them in their
basket and then starting to scan to see what to keep.

I spoke with one of the organizers and she told me that she goes and sorts
books twice a week at their warehouse. It is all volunteer work ... but it got
me thinking that you could earn extra income by bringing a scanner. Although
in this case it might be better to just alert the charity running the book
sale of the item's value.

------
asmithmd1
If the goal of sales that ban scanners is to get the book into the hands of
someone who wants to read it they could do what the Baltimore Book Thing does
when they give away free books -- stamp the title page as a free book, not for
resale. Kind of like the viral effect of GPL. Once a book has been through the
Baltimore Book thing's hands it is always free

<http://www.bookthing.org>

~~~
angusgr
This is an admirable idea, but I can't help but think of the number of CDs
I've bought at used record stores with "Not For Resale" stickers still
affixed. Label review samples that had gone into the second hand channel just
fine.

Also I know from experience that used book sellers will often quite happily
clip or black out portions of the frontispiece or half-title page if they
need/want to.

Collectible book dealers are also quite happy selling galley proofs of classic
books, in fact some people collect them. They're also usually marked "not for
sale".

~~~
ryanpetrich
I think the first-sale doctrine might make that sticker a mere suggestion.

~~~
_delirium
If the copy was acquired through some private, contracted method the first-
sale doctrine might not apply. For example, if you're given a private review
copy of a book under a no-sale contract that you agree to, that's enforceable,
at least in theory, and the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply. However it's
pretty hard to police, and almost all the policing effort that anybody does
expend is pre-release, to try to track down people trying to sell review
copies on eBay before the street date; nobody spends much effort tracking down
people who then sold those review copies 5 years later.

------
stevoski
On a voluntary, part-time basis, I used to run a second-hand store for my
church. A good part of our sales were to second-hand book stores, second-hand
furniture stores, second-hand CD stores, and second-hand (read: retro/vintage)
clothing stores. I loved these customers - they came reliably and almost
always bought something. They didn't haggle, and didn't ask for credit or for
things to be held for them.

The guy who wrote this Slate article is doing a similar thing - being a
regular purchasing customer of the places he frequents.

------
lsc
many years ago, back when I was sawed-off software (arguably a much cooler
name than prgmr.com) while the software for all this was still being built, my
goal was to create software for these people. I failed, but it was an amusing
story.

I though "well, first I need to sell some books, so I know what it's actually
like" I'd hit craigslist for anyone wanting to move more than 500 books for
under $0.10 per. At my peak I think I was approaching 10,000 books. Yes, I
learned what it was like to be a book seller, but I got so distracted by
actually selling that my software never amounted to anything salable. I
eventually gave up when the competition's software reached a certain level of
quality.

It was fun, though. did you know the barcodes on mass market paperbacks don't
have ISBNs? trade paperbacks and hardcover paperbacks usually have ISBNs right
on the barcodes, but not mass market paperbacks.

Mass market paperbacks have a publisher specific prefix, then the last four
digits of the ISBN... so what I did was I created a lookup table that went
from the publisher prefix to the ISBN prefix. whenever the software hit a
unknown publisher prefix, it would ask the users to input the full ISBN by
hand, from which it could fill in the database for that publisher prefix.

It was a lot of fun, but aside from getting distracted by actually selling
books, I was focusing on the inventory control aspects of it... I was not
picky about the sort of books I bought, so the vast majority would sit in
inventory forever, and bring a dollar after shipping if they ever did sell. I
talked about some kind of PDA scanner you could take to booksales, but I was
obsessed with figuring out how to automatically identify the pre-barcode books
(which seemed to be where the real money was) rather than going for the low-
hanging fruit, the barcode books that were worth a few bucks.

my vast collection was donated to my brothers, who I think ran the bookselling
software for a month before deciding it wasn't worth it. It ended up getting
donated to the local "friends of the library" booksellers. (of course, the
books had all been online for a year; anything that had a barcode and anything
like a market value had gotten sold; I pity any other seller who wanted to
pick through the mess.)

I did have some really neat pre-ISBN books. I had several translations of "the
little red book" and a book by jack chick where he rants against something or
other, I forget exactly. I think I still have a beautiful picture book about
the American fission bomb tests over the pacific islands.

~~~
orenmazor
I not only enjoyed your post, but laughed when you said you were obsessed with
pre-isbn scanning. I can instantly guarantee that would be a mistake I would
make as well.

~~~
lsc
the thing of it is that it'd be a whole lot easier now, with modern
smartphones having a decent amount of cpu and good cameras.

It'd still be really difficult to do the true "pre ISBN" books just 'cause
those are difficult to identify even with human help. often the
printing/publisher/ etc... info isn't on the amazon page, and that sort of
thing is huge when it comes to values.

But for the post ISBN (or the SBN? what was that called? the american book
number, before it was International?) things would be much easier; yeah,
you've gotta ocr a string, but with today's smartphones, that'd be pretty
easy. then you just come up with a list of editions or what have you. You'd
still have the problem of amazon's info about old books being not great, but
you'd at least duck the problem of getting a different book with the same
title (which is more common than you think.)

Really, if I were to enter that market now, I'd definitely focus on the pre-
barcode books, just 'cause as far as I can tell, the software for dealing with
barcodes is pretty good, and I think modern smartphones are now powerful
enough to do the OCR and other stuff required to deal with that sort of thing.

------
AlexMuir
I thought about building a system for charity/thrift stores that let them scan
in the ISBN of every book donated. I'd run a central database so you could
search for a book and see where it's in stock in your city. Likewise could set
alerts for when a given book is donated - and helps store to price books
appropriately.

I decided it was unlikely that people would find the books they wanted in
their city so it's pointless. Didn't see this angle though - catching the odd
winner that goes unnoticed.

~~~
llimllib
I used to work for a company that scans books donated to Goodwill/etc on a
very large scale. They buy books from thrift stores and library systems by the
ton, and have an automated process to scan them and determine if they're
valuable or not.

------
vdoma
I go to plenty of used book sales at libraries and these guys are annoying as
hell. They scan and hoard a lot of the books irrespective of the topic, and
later spend time looking at each one to check its resale prospects. What they
don't want, they dump back, not necessarily where they were supposed to be,
and head out.

My library has even started posting flyers saying hoarding is disallowed.
Libraries have also started not bringing out all the books at once, so that
once these guys have done their "business", there's more quality books left
for the rest. As for me, I think they should just ban the use of these devices
at these sales.

------
Jun8
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I _detest_ these people. I see them always in big
book sales: they come in very early, hoard all the books that they think are
valuable, and I mean hundreds of books and then scan through them nervously.
In the end they pick their selection and leave the mess in a corner.
Meanwhile, I do not have access to those books!

~~~
stevoski
Sure you have access to these second-hand books - at the going market rate on
Amazon.

~~~
Jun8
Let me explain more clearly (i) they quickly hoard together good books at the
sale, cutting off access to other prospective buyers on location, like me,
(ii) they buy a very small percentage of the books they hoard (guy in the OP
says 1 in 30), the others books are just left in an unordered pile, so it's
hard for other people to find them, and finally (iii) they create a mess for
the sale organizers, I've heard many organizers complain about them and some
sales won't let them in.

It's like a guy who runs in a cafeteria, gets all the good desserts and then
tries to sell them to you.

~~~
roel_v
Well sounds like the people organizing the book sale are doing a bad job
keeping their patrons in check, then. No matter where you go, there are always
going to be assholes. I have friend & family who own bars & restaurants - I
can tell you that a guy trying to monopolize the dessert buffet and causing
annoyance to the other guests is going to find himself outside on the pavement
real quick.

------
burnout1540
I have some confessions to make too. I did what this guy did but in a much
more automated, scalable fashion. I did online book marketplace arbitrage.

Basically, I wrote software to automatically find books for sale on one used
book site on the web and listed the same book for sale (with a markup) on
another site. If my listing was purchased, my software would automatically
purchase the book from the original seller and have it shipped directly to my
buyer.

In the second half of 2007 I did over $200K in sales and had 10s of thousands
of books listed for sale at a time. If anyone has any interest, I might write
a blog post about it.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
Out of $200K in sales, what was your take home?

~~~
burnout1540
About $50K. It was still ramping up at the time though and I am aware of
people doing the same thing who, I believe, are easily making $1M+.

------
jonpaul
$1000 a week? That's it? Yes, I know that you can make a decent living on that
(in the Midwest)... but for what? Would you truly be happy doing that? It just
seems like a lot of busy work with little long-term return. Most software devs
make much more than that. I guess I'm not really keen on the idea of trading
hours for dollars. To each their own I guess.

~~~
eru
You don't need any education, and not much enterprising spirit to do the book
thing.

It's not a line of work that competes with developing software.

------
shalmanese
This seems like kind of a weird arbitrage opportunity. Why don't bookshop
owners use the exact same setup to price books when they buy them in the first
place?

~~~
edfrtghjkjh
Most bookshops do, in fact since Amazon/abebooks/etc most used bookstores do
<50% of their business through the door. They make their money on Amazon,
others don't even bother with the store anymore - they buy job lots of books
put them in cheap warehouse space and sell them for 1c making money on the s+h

This guys trawls library sales, thrift stores etc. Library sales are normally
run for charity and everything is 50c, the librarians have already selected
the books to go into the sale so there isn't much chance of a $100 book being
found. The aim of 'friends of the library' group of little old lady volunteers
isn't really to invest $1000s in high tech to make a little more money.

~~~
eru
The library should give the scanners to the old ladies, then.

~~~
edfrtghjkjh
Presumably the library already has the ISBN of the books it is getting rid of.

They could pull out the ones worth >$1 after checking on Amazon and then
package and ship them - but thats probably not cost effective for a library
employee and getting little old ladies to spend the day packaging and shipping
isn't what they volunteered for.

They could get in some minimum wage temp labor to do this once a year - but
that's not really the libraries core business. It would be like having police
patrol cars pick up cans by the side of the freeway for the 5c recycling (now
theres a business model)

------
angusgr
Used book dealers are a strange lot. I never heard or saw of scanners, but
when I worked at one we'd certainly look online for any book that we thought
might be valuable. I think, especially at that time (2001-2004), the internet
was inflating rather than devaluing used book prices in Australia.

The strangest people are dealers/collectors who would spend hours of their
saturday in the store, eventually buying a cheap book so they could smugly
inform you, the seller, that it was a collectible edition, worth much more
than they paid. Or that they would be swapping the dust jacket from this copy
onto their copy, thereby improving its condition, even though this jacket was
from the second printing not the first. Or dozens of other strange obscure
tricks.

Those are the people who don't need scanners, and presumably would resent them
as a poor substitute for their encyclopedic knowledge.

------
kujawa
This kind of reminds me of the beginning of the Ninth Gate, a rather under-
appreciated Johnny Depp movie from about 10 years ago.

Without, of course, the hot woman who turns out to be Satan.

~~~
eru
She reads "How to win friends and influence people" on the train.

------
Tichy
For ages I have dreamed about a service where shoppers could visit flea
markets and do an immediate auction if they find something of value. There
would be a live stream of "interesting" items on the site, and anybody who
wants to buy could immediately connect to the shopper to make him buy the
item.

I guess there were too many problems with this model, and I didn't expect high
interest (I was more in love with it from a tech angle, doing stuff with
phones...). But I just realized that this book scanning business is actually a
viable subset of that idea. If image recognition was better, it could also
work for other items besides books. (Perhaps image recognition technology is
actually good enough by now).

------
ja27
I've made a few good sales from library finds, usually on more timeless or
slow-changing technology books. A COBOL book holds value a lot longer than a
Java or .NET book.

I've tried without success to convince my local Friends of the Library to sell
the more profitable incoming books online themselves.

------
cjy
I can totally relate to this article. My college library would sell books it
got from estate sales but didn't want. I would hang out in the library with my
laptop looking up ISBNs on amazon. I found a few gems and sold a cake
decorating handbook for $150. I can identify with the feeling of shame. I
think it is a noble job, but something felt wrong about skimming books only
for their monetary value. It was an irrational emotion, but it was hard to
shake.

------
lukev
Fun project:

Build an OCR product that can identify a whole shelf of books at once - the
title and author are almost always on the spine, which should be able to
uniquely identify 99% of books.

It should actually be technically feasible. This would be a great project for
someone doing graduate work in OCR or machine vision. Bonus points for doing
it on a live video feed so you can just walk down an aisle pointing your
iPhone at the shelf.

------
maurits
This reminds me a bit of high frequency trading. He is fast, thrives on market
inefficiencies and is somewhat frowned upon.

------
Dove
At Value Village (a thrift store), items are priced with colored tags. They
are left on the racks for a few weeks, go through a week at 50% off, and then
spend one day at 99 cents before being removed and discarded. That last
markdown to 99 cents occurs regardless of the original price. Computer desks,
leather jackets, sewing machines -- they go for 99 cents on that day.

I observed a unique phenomenon on 99 cent day: there was usually a crowd when
we opened the store, and they moved quickly and bought a lot of random things.
After some reflection, I figured they were probably resellers.

------
hristov
He should educate himself on older books. It seems that ISBNs have been out
only since the 70s, which means that most truly valuable books won't have
them.

He is right that it will be rare if he actually sees a valuable old book, but
since he is already going through so many books chances are he will see some
from time to time. So he might as well learn something, so that he recognizes
a truly valuable book when he sees it.

~~~
m0nty
_It seems that ISBNs have been out only since the 70s, which means that most
truly valuable books won't have them._

I almost did a web dev job for a bookseller who was closing his bricks-and-
mortar store to go online, and he said the really profitable books were not
the really old ones. It would be a book someone remembered from their
childhood, etc. Mostly modern stuff. It takes a seriously long time for
oldness to impart value.

------
jdoliner
While this arbitrage is fun and makes you feel very clever (as arbitrage
almost always does). I'm not sure why this is framed as "Confessions." The
author pretends this is some affront to books but books are one of the
earliest mass produced commodities in existence (perhaps the earliest), this
ease of redistribution is really one of the most important features of books.

------
roel_v
Maybe there's money to be made here in an automated way (call it the HFT of
the used-book markets). I was looking for the Graphics Gems series on Amazon &
Abebooks the other day, and the cheapest ones went for 1-4 dollars, while the
expensive ones went for 40-60 dollars (not sure if they're getting sold at
that price, but it's the asking price). If one would scan these sits and
identify wide spreads, one could buy up the inventory at the bottom of the
market and re-list at market price. Maybe one could deal with the transaction
costs (S&H) by agreeing on bulk shipping or so, or letting sellers ship
directly to the end-customer if one can be found within a week or two (agree
with the seller that they keep the book in inventory for two weeks, if you
find a seller within that time have it shipped directly, otherwise to your own
storage).

------
waivej
To me he seemed like a primitive cyborg. I'm having fun imagining what we'll
see in 20-30 years.

Also it's the hidden the gold makes panning fun. These guys are using fancy
tools to strip it out and leave thrift stores with piles of leftover dirt.

------
latch
Enjoyed this a lot. Its a great story that stands on its own.

Having said that, a part of me wants more details about the
business...avg/min/max markup, avg/min/max time to resell, insurance cost (if
any), markup on shipping. % of online business (or is 100% amazon
(probably))....

------
lelele
> We were in the library's book-sale room when I overheard him telling his
> friend that the two of them were surrounded by assholes—that is, the people
> scanning.

Just a competitor feeling the heat ;-)

------
Tichy
What makes traditional barcode scanners so much more efficient than smartphone
cameras? Any chance to catch up on speed?

------
klbarry
I guess I must also not be going to the right sales, at the right time. I've
been to many many where I live and have never seen a scanner. That said, I
think what he's doing is awesome - most of the books he takes are probably
pretty banal anyway, as someone else pointed out.

------
noverloop
Arbitrage in action

