Where do they come up with prices for books? I’ve been looking for a number of Young Indiana Jones books to complete my collection. They come up on eBay every couple of months or so. I’ve looked on ABE and just now on the bookfinder and they want $100 or more for some of these books! On eBay I normally get them for a couple of bucks each to maybe 10-15 for the harder ones to find. I can see some price difference, but not 10 times as much.
I just wanted to boast that my father-in-law has a first edition volume set of Lewis & Clark’s expedition – printed in 1810 or something like that. It’s in very good shape, with the fold-out maps intact and everything. He’s saving it for… I don’t know what, I guess - I was going to say retirement but he’s already retired. A similar set was sold a few years ago at auction for around $100,000.
However, they are not signed…
Most used booksellers have reference works on the values of used books (yes, there are books on the subject - and of course there are now also CDs) that they consult. Those that don’t - the ones who plan to stay in business, that is - do online searches, to see what others are asking for given titles. Most newbies just take a stab at it, and either ask way too much, or way too little.
That last crowd are the ones you get the eBay bargains from. If I’m looking for a title, I will check eBay, ABE, and Amazon. If I am not happy with what I’m finding, I will check BookFinder.com, or maybe addall.com. The thing with addall (and most other meta-search engines) is that they have a lot of Asian/Pacific sites - sometimes there are bargains to be had, but the cost of postage - even surface rates, which usually take a month or two - usually means you wind up paying more, or even much more. Bookfinder’s bias, OTOH, is toward North American and European sites. Yes, postage from Canada is higher, and postage from the UK, Ireland or Europe is even higher, but it doesn’t remotely compare with postage from Australia, NZ, Singapore or the Philippines, unless you’re asking somebody to sent you a big, heavy book via airmail, or they’re ripping you off on the S&H charges.
Exapno Mapcase, I know that lots of prices on any site that aggregates are pipe dreams, and so does anyone who buys books regularly. The problem with people starting out is that they don’t have a knowledge base to help them realize that there’ll be another copy along. Of course, that doesn’t apply to firsts of John Dunning’s first several books 
- or to a number of other titles I could list. The problem is acquiring enough knowledge to know when - and where - to buy. Nearly everybody starting out makes some mistakes; it’s called “paying your dues”.
I just went to Amazon and did a search on “book collecting”. It returned 1133 results. Even on the first page, some of them were clear duds - like books on rock collecting. That’s one thing that frustrates me about Amazon’s searches - the results are never very good, unless you use the “power” search. Even then, odds are that you’ll get about 20% stupid, useless results (as opposed to about a third - maybe nearly all, unless there’s something unusual about the author’s name or the title - that aren’t what you want from a regular search).
ABE’s search engine is rather better - especially since they added Boolean searching, but I’ve used Bookfinder to find books in ABE’s database that weren’t returned on a search at the site itself. eBay’s search engine is more useful in most ways. Generally there are fewer bizarre results, but they can also miss stuff in their own DB that an outside search engine can find. One thing that really bugs me is that, AFAIK, none of the book search engines will allow you to select to search in all English-speaking countries. That would eliminate all (or almost all) the copies of a book in other languages, while still permitting a nearly comprehensive result.
You’re probably comparing apples and oranges. The only YIJ book near $100 I find on bookfinder is a hardback first edition of the first book, the Plantation Treasure. But the paperback prices start at $1.00. That accounts for all the difference right there. None of the YIJ books of that title on ebay appear to be hardcover, from a quick glance.
Collectors want collectibles. Usually, though not always, that’s the first hardcover edition and printing in the best possible condition with the best possible dust jacket. If you want something else, then ebay is fine. But you pay for collectibles because of their rarity. Rare books seldom turn up on ebay. That’s what you go to real booksellers for.
I don’t know much about book collecting, and i certainly don’t have the money to do it. But when i want to see some really cool stuff, i waste some time browsing the Bauman Rare Books website.
Sample entries:
Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. First edition, inscribed by Hemingway. $16,500.
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. Principia Mathematica. 1910. First editions of all three volumes of this classic study of logic and mathematics, very likely one of fewer than 50 copies surviving in private hands. $45,000.
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. London, 1929. First trade edition, printed by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, in the scarce original dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. $6500.
J.R.R. Tolkien. The Hobbit. 1937. First edition, first printing, in original dust jacket designed by Tolkien, one of only 1500 copies printed. $65,000.
Frank Herbert. Dune. 1965. First edition. $8500.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. 1855. Extraordinarily scarce and important first edition of the most important volume of American poetry, one of only 795 copies printed. $60,000.
Dr. Seuss. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. 1938. First edition of Dr. Seuss’s second book, boldly inscribed “With very best wishes–Dr. Seuss.” $5800.
Alice Walker. The Color Purple. New York, 1982. First edition, signed by Alice Walker. $1500.
Good points, which demonstrate the fact that ‘first edition’ alone says little. I saw another episode of Cash in the Attic (eeek, I’ve admitted to watching such programmes), where they found a first edition of Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. It sold for over £1000.
Indeed. The thing that confuses newbies to book collecting is that, as Exapno Mapcase mentioned, collectors want first edition, first printing.
You see, a book that starts selling better than the publisher expected soon enough after it is released gets additional printings. I was just learning about that stuff when I first met Mary Russell. As a result, I have a beautifully inscribed copy of the third printing of The Sparrow. :smack:
I thought about buying a copy of the first, a couple of years later, but at that time, they were getting astronomical prices (near $100). Now, you can find a clean copy on Amazon for about what it originally cost. But I’ve given up the idea of getting a duplicate; it’s not worth the effort.
In looking back, I noticed that I used my sig twice in this thread. My apologies to all. It was unintentional.