
A Penny for Your Books - Brendinooo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html
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DaveWalk
The penny booksellers always fascinated me. The reporting in this piece has
some interesting data: Thriftbooks sells 12 million books a year, for
something like $2 per book (on the $0.01 cost + $3.99 shipping). I imagine
Amazon could have some serious leverage if it wanted to.

And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem like
a lot? Is that maybe the source of the industry? Supply is overwhelmingly
high. I know this model is the same for Hollywood and VCs, but wow. I can't
imagine if 300,000 movies were released on DVD every year.

~~~
cba9
> And yet, 300,000 new books were published in 2013. Wow! Doesn't that seem
> like a lot?

Isn't it amazing? And about that rate has been sustained for decades, as well.
Can you imagine hundreds of thousands of books being published every year for
decades? Who's writing them? How is this economicly sustainable? (If it's not,
do we _really_ need to incentivize publication with ever longer copyright?)
This is why when Google Books tried to estimate how many books had ever been
published, they got a lower bound of 129 million and no real idea how much off
they might be.

And it's not just books, either. There's maybe 100,000 albums being released
every year, which means in our lifetime we'll hit 1 billion+. The number of
feature films keeps going up (4000 a year not terribly long ago). The TV
industry is feeling shellshocked by just how many programs are in production
now. And all these numbers seem like they must be undercounts because who is
really able to track how many new songs get uploaded to Youtube every day by
professionals, amateurs, and all sorts of indescribable people? And in the
rest of the world like China?

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extra88
> 100,000 albums being released every year, which means in our lifetime we'll
> hit 1 billion+

Even assuming a lifetime is 100 years, that would be only 10 million albums.
There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a billion
in a lifetime.

I think a lot of albums don't take much effort to produce, EPs from garage
bands and bedroom turntablists probably require less effort than even a trashy
novel. Of course a decent number of those 300,000 new books are very low-
effort affairs as well.

~~~
cba9
> There would have to be 10 million albums released per year to get to a
> billion in a lifetime.

Sorry, I left out that part of Kelly's estimate of 1b songs is that album
rates will also continue to increase at the historical rate. It seems
improbable to me that we could really hit 1.1b songs by 2060 (it's such a
mindboggling number), but on the other hand, the world keeps getting
wealthier, making music keeps getting cheaper, and the appetite and dreams of
people for making music seems to know no limits...

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PhasmaFelis
I'd like to see more focus on the fact that Amazon is straight-up lying about
shipping-and-handling costs, which is how these guys are able to list books as
selling for $0.01+$3.99 S&H when it's more like $2+$2 S&H. I had thought it
was "just" the sellers being dishonest, but apparently it's an Amazon mandate:

> _A “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon
> typically carry a $3.99 shipping fee. But that isn’t a reflection of the
> actual cost of shipping them — it’s a function of the company’s rules, which
> mandate a consistent shipping cost for every category of the product in the
> Marketplace. Amazon takes a standard cut of every book sold — $1.35 — which
> leaves each of the penny sellers of “A Visit From the Goon Squad” with a
> whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item, shipping and handling, labor,
> rent on warehouses and all the other costs that come up along the way._

At least they've gotten better about showing the full price with shipping in
the comparison page, but that only mitigates the issue.

~~~
waqf
Amazon mandates that they charge exactly $3.99 for S+H, because previously
when everyone set their own charges for S+H, it was difficult for the consumer
to compare prices from different vendors, and the vendors were incentivized to
inflate S+H so that their books would look cheaper than they were.

Of course it would be more logical for Amazon to mandate S+H of $0 so that
what you see is what you pay, but I think the current system is a reasonable
compromise.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _the vendors were incentivized to inflate S+H so that their books would look
> cheaper than they were._

And they're still doing that, only now they're not merely incentivized to do
so, but required.

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Johnny555
I bought a lot of used books from Amazon when shipping used to cost $1.99 or
$2.99, but now that it's $3.99, there's less of a differential between the
cost of a new book (or Kindle book) and the cost of a used book (that may have
problems like missing pages, which happened to me twice -- very frustrating to
be hours into a book and find out that several pages were torn out for some
reason). So now I rarely buy used.

Though I guess enough people are buying them to make it worthwhile to sell
them.

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gregn
Go to abebooks.com. Often the same sellers sell the exact same books there but
with 2.50 shipping instead of 3.99. I almost never shop at amazon anymore for
the simple reason that their used book base shipping rate is too high. But
that's me; I'm addicted to used books.

~~~
DaveWalk
I'm right there with you. I find the psychological race-to-the-bottom
fascinating: a book at $4 is not nearly worth it when it could cost $2.50.

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dmschulman
I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without
spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination
was to hop onto Amazon and find as many used titles at $1 or less as I could.
Only after filling my cart did I discover my $24 worth of books would cost $80
to ship.

I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the
process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far
Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It
seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic
sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd
otherwise be decomposing in a landfill.

With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out
there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely
to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I
feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some
cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to
avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to
one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my
money rather than 7 cents per book.

~~~
gregn
check out abebooks.com. They have the best search engine for books when it
comes to facts about the specific book, such as: is it a first edition? If its
a hard cover, does it come with a dust jacket, and if so what condition are
both in? Cheers

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ChuckMcM
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10461019)

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WalterBright
The local libraries around here get rid of books at $.25 to $2.00 each. I pick
up a lot of sci fi that way.

