The WorkGroup

I wasn’t the first person to think about buying super-techie books off eBay to resell elsewhere. There was some tough competition, and I found that the best way to buy these books was through a sniping service, that charged me a moderate fee to be my bid at the last second. That kept prices relatively low and leaving me free to wander around instead of hovering over eBay auctions, trying to push a button 1 nanosecond later than someone else.

Then there were a crowd of people so eager to dump their warehouse full of technical books they were selling the same books on eBay and Amazon. I slowly learned to avoid these people’s books, because if I sold the same book on Amazon they would use automated programs to drop their price two cents below mine, night after night.

So for real profit, that left the oddball books that sold slowly, but at high prices (often older books, with historical value), or the occasional hot and newer books at the warehouse dumpers weren’t selling.

I bought a lot of these types of books at one time, to create a little financial cushion, and three years later I donated the last of them. I sold a very satisfying number of books between $50 and $100 each. I found that these higher-end books sold better if I was willing to ship them internationally. I even offered express international shipping, but only if the book was small enough to fit within one of those flat rate envelopes.

On the whole, I also found Amazon customers a pretty happy lot. I had few, if any, requests for returns, especially among the scientific book crowd.

These days I’m too busy to play around with hobby ways of making money, but I still think there are legs in used book arbitrage. The same holes in the market still exist, and as long as people are willing to dump books on eBay for almost nothing (because they’re unwilling to wait months or even years for them to sell on Amazon), there’ll be an inefficiency you can take advantage of. Those people will probably always be there.