One of the strangest pricing metrics I’ve come across is in the used book business. people in the used book trade often for books by weight. The going rate in the US appears to be 5¢ to 25¢ per pound, with the unit of purchase being the pallet (a pallet of books weighs about 1,300 pounds, so will cost between $65 and $325 per pallet).
buy books by the kilo! I can’t think of anything beyond value-based pricing. why does this make sense?
You are reading: Sell books by weight
It’s almost like mining. books bought by the pound are the land of payment: “earth, rock, or other raw materials that contain (or may contain) profitable quantities of ore or other valuable materials.” for paydirt to be valuable, a lot of processing needs to be done and then transported to market. the same with books, although in this case the processing is done in the seller’s warehouse where it is more convenient. Buying books by the pound is a way of managing uncertainty about value. reduces all books to their lowest common denominator and uses that as a pricing metric. if the uncertainty about the value could be reduced, the price would rise.
in fact, that’s exactly what happens. Buyers use a variety of techniques to reduce uncertainty. sometimes they buy a sample. the minimum purchase is usually a pallet, but sometimes it is a truck. then one works through the sample, finds out what is in the sample, and determines how much to pay. of course, one has to hope that it is really a representative sample.
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The other technique is provenance. where do the books come from? Have they already been selected and all the best books selected or are they new to the market? are they discards from a small local library or are they from private ownership (private holdings are generally more valuable than other sources, these are consignments that sell for 25 cents or more per pound).
An important thing to remember about trading in used books is that there is a minimum price. if you can’t sell the book, you can sell it as pulp.
Is there such a thing in the software? indeed there is a small but emerging market for undifferentiated data sets. there are some companies that are buying data by volume (megabytes or even terabytes). rapid improvements in data mining make it worthwhile to buy undifferentiated data (the paydirt) and process it into minerals (information nuggets or even predictions).
Unfortunately, some of this is happening on the gray market or even the black market. In the last six months, the inevitable offers from questionable development shops have been joined by people offering data of dubious provenance, or even legality. the prices are unbelievably low, but someone must be buying or there wouldn’t be as many sellers.
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We do not suggest you purchase any of this data. No. only buy data if you know it was legally obtained and you can prove the value. but if you’re selling data, and many organizations are, you’ll want to avoid selling it in volume. how do you do that?
don’t sell garbage, sell mineral.
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know your data, and be able to describe your properties to potential buyers. you must be able to extract some data yourself to provide the essays to the buyer and not be dependent on them. reducing search costs increases value. this is especially true in a world awash with data of all levels of quality and relevance.
differentiate your data. anything undifferentiated is sold at the market price. the market price tends to the variable cost. the variable cost of data approaches zero. Remember that differentiation is always (i) for a specific customer or customer segment and (ii) relative to the next best competitive alternative. A market segment is defined as a set of buyers who obtain value in the same way.
add value to data through rich metadata, at the file level and through embedded metadata. The metadata you use to improve value will depend on your target markets and use cases.
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