I was browsing amazon.com this weekend and ran across some books where the price for some of the used copies are being offered for more than amazon’s new book price. I find this kind of strange, as the books aren’t out of print yet. Are there people out there playing the book market, buying things they hope to sell for a big profit once they go out of print? Why post the higher prices while the book is still available?
That is indeed odd.
Is the book showing as available new at Amazon? In stock?
I’ve heard that some booksellers in the Amazon Marketplace have programs that automatically price their books for them. Maybe these programs are out of whack.
I got nuthin’.
If Amazon shows something like “Ships in three to six weeks” that means it is not in stock. Buyers are willing to pay a premium to get that item more quickly from a third-party seller.
Yes, I recently saw a 30 dollar book for over 300 dollars - from two different sellers. I wondered at first if it were a typo.
I for one have a number of old books of mine for sale at Amazon, and sometimes I take a book out of the ‘for sale’ shelf for a few days, to reread them over a few evenings’ dinners, and increased the sale price at Amazon temporarily from, say, 9 € to 909 €.
Once the ‘I am on vacation’ feature did not work for some reason (the offers did not get taken off the book pages), and I had to resort to that sort of thing (9 € to 909 €, 12 € to 912 €, etc.) for all my offers before leaving on vacation.
A place-holder? That makes sense.
I see extremely inflated prices from a few of the larger sellers consistently, although they also have great numbers of books priced competitively on the Market. Perhaps they are using these high prices as placeholders until they get a given title in stock. (And, if someone does buy their book for ten times the going rate, it is easy enough to buy a copy at market price and make an obscene profit. As the old joke goes, they only need to sell one.)
Another possibility is that, when the used book seller originally set their price, it was lower than Amazon’s new price (or the book wasn’t available new), but since then, the book has either come back into print or gone on sale.
Here’s an example.
Amazon has it in stock for $14.93. The cheapest private seller is $13.98, there are five more offers for just a few cents less than amazon’s price, and then it jumps to above it, mostly only by a few dollars, then the last two offers are for twice amazon’s price. I love the idea of buying books and selling them at a profit, if only I could figure out how. 
My guess is that some book dealers price all of their products for whatever they think the market will bear and then, when they sign on with Amazon, they just list all of their books and prices. In a case like that, they’re not going to go back and crosscheck all of their prices against Amazon’s and some of their books are going to end up higher priced than Amazon’s.