Each company strives to select any rare books that may be difficult to auto-scan. The systems are based on barcodes and International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), relatively recent innovations in the history of book publishing. thriftbooks has a special “antique” team dedicated to selecting rare and vintage books, trained for recognized first editions. discover books relies on your usual scanning system to select potentially valuable old books.
From then on, it’s all about software. let’s say a new copy of “a goon squad visit” is scanned into the database. The software rushes to find out how many copies are in stock, how many copies have been sold, how the price has changed over time, what the current average is, the high and low prices on amazon, barnes & noble, half.com, abebooks, ebay and alibris, and decide: do we want this book? If the software’s algorithm decides that this is a sellable and worth-selling book, it will automatically be stored and listed on the online marketplace where it has the best chance of selling. all this happens tens of thousands of times a day.
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This is a game of pennies and lightning quick resets. Buyers have no particular loyalty to any of these sellers; it’s about what’s cheapest and what comes first. each company, seeking an advantage, jealously builds and guards its own software. Ward was the lead developer of the thriftbooks software before becoming president. he has 12 developers, a full-time data scientist, and two financial analysts on his staff. discover books software is known internally as trim2. “We have software that we’ve spent years and a lot of money on,” Hincy says, “tweaking it to be as optimal as possible so that book has the best chance of selling.”
I asked ward to track some books for me, and within seconds, he generated a graph showing their prices over time. For recent books, supply is low, because the book hasn’t been on the market long and demand is generally high. As a result, ThriftBooks doesn’t sell many copies of popular new books like Marie Kondo’s “The Magic of Tidying Up That Changes Your Life,” and when it does, they can cost as much as $15. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt, a 2013 literary success, is in its second stage of life; Its price, Ward says, has stabilized around $5. But that book sold more than three million copies (including e-books), which means more and more of them will find their way to goodwill and thrift stores and eventually to Ward warehouses. and so the price will sink lower and lower, eventually bottoming out on a penny.
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a “penny book” is something of a misnomer. Used books sold on Amazon typically have a shipping fee of $3.99. But that’s not a reflection of the actual cost of shipping: It’s a function of company rules, which require a constant shipping cost for each product category in the marketplace. amazon takes a standard share of every book sold ($1.35), leaving each of the “a goon squad visit” penny sellers with a whopping $2.65 to cover the cost of the item , shipping and handling, labor, warehouse rental, and all other costs along the way.
The vendors didn’t tell me exactly how much they make on penny books. Shipping costs vary depending on the types of deals you can make with delivery services. “We make more than the cost of postage to send it, but not much,” Ward says. “a couple of cents, to be honest.” But sellers don’t just sell penny books: Ward says less than half of his stock sells at that price. and because processing costs don’t increase with the price of the book, while second-hand books may fetch only pennies on a penny book, they will fetch $2, plus a few pennies, from a book priced at $2. not bad, when you sell 12 million books a year. (For what it’s worth, books like “A Visit From The Goon Squad” are usually sold wholesale at Barnes & Noble at 40 to 50 percent off the list price. The list price for the paperback version is $15.95, and barnes & noble currently sells it for $9.49, giving you a profit of…very, very little.)
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