Adventures in buying and selling used books online: ABE, fvck bezos but Amazon secondhand, other suggestions, tales, advice, warnings and more

jesus

where to cop

Bookselling in 2020. pic.twitter.com/TXMZAq8miN
— Stephen Sparks (@rs_sparks) April 28, 2020

― calzino, Tuesday, April 28, 2020 3:14 AM (two days ago)

Funny story, a week or 2 ago I ordered 3 books from his store, real-time inventory indicated all were in stock.

He only sent 1 book and cancelled the other 2, but sent a quasi-friendly email explanation.

One of the cancelations was a signed copy of a book that he shows he still has plenty of non-signed editions available, and he didn't even bother to offer that to me...

Too busy tweeting I guess?

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All Gates Open: The Story of CAN has increased from $37.60 to $57.71

fuck you

i put it in my cart two days ago because i'm trying to figure out how to burn a gift card i received for my birthday. went to check out and sure enough

i guess it's not a used book

General impression: buying online, whether from abe or amazon, has gotten much more expensive the past two or three years. There are four or five books I'm holding off on right now because I can't find them cheaper than $50 on either site by the time you add postage and exchange. Seems like I was always able to find something for no more than $20 just a few years ago, no matter how relatively new it was. Not sure if the pandemic will push prices higher or lower--instinct says higher if used stores are further endangered.

back to used:

a frustrating thing is the impossibility to get any specifics about book conditions pretty much across the board at all the secondhand online spots. it's obvious that the GOOD / VERY GOOD designations are purposefully vague and sellers generally can't be bothered to make a note of the imperfections of any specific example of a book for sale. disheartening to send an inquiry and basically always get the same stock response i.e. "i'm at a computer, the books are in a warehouse, my system is showing that this book is in GOOD condition, thanks from The Little Enchanted Treehouse Bookstore in Ann Arbor!" okay so you don't even know if it has the dust jacket, thanks so much. obviously the result of a business model perpetuated by the people you can sometimes spot at estate sales with nothing but a barcode scanner. scum.

can't wait for real bookstores to be open (and for me to feel safe going to them, which will inevitably be later).

also when i do get around to selling off some of my own books i'm going to emphatically do my part to correct this contemptible state of affairs, mark s being a guiding light in this regard

(My post holds true for used books online too--more expensive every year, and yeah, condition is a bit of a dice roll. Most of what I've ordered has been okay, but I've received supposedly VG books that had pages torn or the binding barely functional.)

yall know any biographies or w/e abt the rare book selling trade? i recently read the michael vinson 'bluffing texas style' abt a texan rare book dealer turned forger/arsonist etc, it was ok but isnt quite what i wanted

nothing comes to mind at the moment, although i have a memoir around somewhere by a rare book collector. think it was published in the '70s. i'll post here if i can dig it up.

you might be interested in "dark back of time" by javier marías, which is about a lot of things but antiquarian bookshops / rare (sometimes but not always fake) book searching + collecting plays a major role and it's a very swell read imo.

thx both sound interesting

My husband ordered me a copy of Hitchcock's Films Revisited by Robin Wood for my birthday from Amazon Marketplace about six weeks ago now and got a message on his account last week that it "may be lost." First time I've ever had bad experiences with any of these things (I usually go with ABE myself, but Marketplace has never been a problem for me before). Wondering how much longer I should give it before I declare it "definitely lost."

A Pound of Paper by John Baxter is pretty good but UK-focussed, iirc

i really enjoyed the booksellers doc (https://booksellersdocumentary.com) now on prime btw

ah ! thanks for sharing.

i love secondhand bookstores but christ, some of the more cranky antiquarian dudes, they're 1000x worse than the record guys

johnny crunch, i found this today while packing up some of my books:

https://www.champandmabel.com/assets/images/product/H12298_139b6dce2b0a84fd5f4186ec2331983e.jpg
the amenities of book collection — a. edward newton

book-collecting*

I immediately read the subtitle as And Kindred Afflictions

cool man, nice book!

posted on the discogs thread because i didn’t know this one existed— i have a lot of book adventures . it’s truly the only thing i spend money on other than food, shelter, and climbing stuff.

bought a book at a decent price from a seller on Abe, didn’t do much research into them but they had a good rating.

i got sent the wrong book, the sort of thing that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, totally useless. i messaged them, they said sorry for mixup, they would get the right book to me. then they said getting the right book to me was impossible, but would i like something else from their inventory because a return hurts their rating. i said no.

asked my bookseller pal about it— it’s a regular scam. a seller will list a book they don’t have, then attempt to buy it from another seller for cheap and make a tiny bit of profit. the issue is that sometimes these “booksellers” don’t keep up with pricing trends, so (as in my case) the book I ordered was being offered for 10-40 less than from other sellers. so because they couldn’t find a cheap copy to sell me, they sent me some trash, say it’s a mistake, then try to get you to choose something else from their “inventory” to keep their rating. insane and maddening.