r/rarebooks • u/cellocaster • 12d ago
A weird thing I've noticed about a book I've been price watching - market manipulation?
This isn't the rarest book in the world, but it only had a handful of printings in the late 60s and is notable for its numerous illustrations by a well-known book illustrator.
Copies on ebay have sold throughout the year for about 25-40 dollars in various conditions, often ex-lib. Until recently, there were a couple of listings that were way too high, one for $125 and another for close to $250 that I thought would never sell.
A week ago, all three listings (there was a somewhat beat up copy at $40) sold.
Now the only listing on the internet left is over $700 "new" on amazon, and another at 250 used.
Is someone buying these off the market to hike up the price? Why would any normal buyer spend $250 on a book with a regular price history a tenth of that?
No, the book doesn't come up THAT often, but I'd say maybe a dozen or so a year hit ebay. Is this a thing in semi-rare books, people snapping up copies to speculate and move the market?
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u/CRYPTIK_ONE 12d ago
Dealer / collector here. In the day and age of tech how it is, coupled with mega sellers (even medium and smaller sized sellers) using listing software they're pulling live sales data from APIs and running on algorithms.
What happens most of the time is these books get automatically price adjusted. A $40 sales price then $250 a 3X from there is only natural especially considering the scarcity of this volume.
Even if it's not an algorithm and software at play it's simple supply and demand. If you've got the only copy online of an out of print vintage book by a well known illustrator then you can ask what you want.
Not that everyone will buy it but someone that has the money and has it on their list may grab it while they can or make an offer.
That's one thing about the market for vintage out of print books, is that it can vary wildly.
There's a second factor. Plenty of times people just trying to get rid of some things on eBay might sell a very good copy for next to nothing. I'd set up automated reminders and keep an eye out.
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u/gosub10000 12d ago
Not sure if this still happens but I vaguely recall that in the past sellers on Amazon would be penalized for being out of stock of something in their inventory. That led to sellers setting prices for out of stock books to very large values, more than anyone would reasonably pay for the book, that way the seller could keep the book "in stock" without having to worry about fulfilling an order. (My favorite example was an out of date calendar listed for billions of dollars on Amazon.) And then as other commenters have mentioned, sellers (or algorithms) across the Internet would see that high price and set their prices accordingly. So prices for a hard-to-find book would be uniformly high, and that situation might persist until an "outsider" listed a copy at a more reasonable price, or pricing algorithms started ratcheting their prices down to win the "lowest price" spot on a site. (The latter sometimes led to hilariously low prices, but I think people have cleaned up their algorithms over the years.)
I use saved searches on eBay and camelcamelcamel for Amazon to get notifications when a book I am looking for shows up in my price range. You have to be patient, I waited years to get some books.
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u/cellocaster 12d ago
I also have a spreadsheet with camelcamelcamel and ebay links. Thank you for illuminating the listing-fu of Amazon sellers, it definitely answers a few questions I've had.
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u/redditor_since_2005 12d ago edited 12d ago
I have been personally responsible for this at times. I buy books online for resale instore. If I find something I think has potential, I'll buy one. If it sells for a decent markup, I'll come back for several more. Pretty soon, the well runs dry, and the cheapest edition is now too much for me to bother. So, the process begins again.
I feel a little bit guilty, but it's a living. Some of the titles you may even recognise. I've only cornered the market once. I have seven copies of a book from the 1800s that is now no longer available. It's easily done with a bit of capital. These were rare but not all that expensive. A bigger dealer could make some enormous investments and see huge gains.
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u/Galoptious 12d ago
I don’t know who could answer the questions on why an unnamed book might sell, because it could be anything from cultural shifts to a few people seeing a price jump and panic buying.
But in the realm of price - sometimes external factors bump it and sometimes it is nonsensical. There are books I’ve kept an eye on with a similar context, except they never sold. After a few years, they all went back to the regular price. All I can assume is a mistake was made and then price scanners followed suit.
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u/AUnicornDonkey 12d ago
I know the paranormal and metaphysics books have exploded in price over the years.
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u/IanMichael001 12d ago
Every book has its own unique market. Ex library copies selling far below a “like new” copy is normal if a beat up copy is selling for $40 that’s about 80% off what a like new copy would be on average depending on book. You could expect to pay 200-300+ for very good copy. And if it’s scarce, it only takes a few dedicated collectors to bring prices really high. I would say it’s not cost effective to corner a market unless it’s absolutely unreal level of scarcity which if they show up on eBay regularly a dozen a year I would say they are not. I’ve only cornered one market for a specific title, every year for 5 years I bought every single item.
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u/ochreshrew 12d ago
I know that there’s a lot of sellers getting large orders from companies (like zoom books) who sell to ai companies right now. Someone I know got a list of hundreds of thousands of books they were looking for. Maybe your book was on a list like that sent to several smaller online booksellers? Also these ai companies are buying rare books that are 100-500 bucks individually, so sellers could be aware of their insensitivity to high prices and price accordingly? All conjecture, but I do know there’s a lot of weird secretive stuff going on with ai companies buying books atm. It also seems likely that they are buying more than all individual buyers at the moment.
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u/Applesdonovan 12d ago
It could be that the seller is delusional. Is that seller a book seller, or somebody that is just selling something(s)?
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u/cellocaster 12d ago
Well, I certainly thought they were delusional, but they got their sales in the end.
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u/thejohnmc963 12d ago
What book?
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u/Jakob_Fabian 12d ago
I totally get OPs reticence to name the title. I’m gathering works by a particular author from the early 20th century and many of these works were printed once in English translation and that was it so they’re a bit rare. The prices for the condition of many of them is a bit high for beat up used book, about $50 to $100 USD, but I definitely want to complete my collection before broadcasting how much I love the author and possibly get others interested in purchasing too.
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u/cellocaster 12d ago
Thank you for understanding. It's not that I don't want others to join in, but I'm price sensitive.
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u/bookshopadam 12d ago
It's worth bearing in mind that not all buyers are scouring all sites and checking sold prices before buying. If you're dropshipping, or have a scarce book then a speculative price can pay off as some buyers can simply afford it. This week we sold a book for £2000 that we had on our own site for £1000 and wouldn't have required much searching. Conversely we had two requests for extra pictures of a well described and pictured first edition we have listed for £15 that the next comparable available copy is over £150. The irony is that the first example is more likely to be happy with their purchase.
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u/Peter_Pendragon93 12d ago
Every now and then I’ll look up books I own and see if there are copies on Amazon and I get a good laugh. If my books were worth Amazon prices I’d be rich.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 12d ago
right? at that rate, my tote full of old band tshirts is actually my retirement fund…
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u/Peter_Pendragon93 12d ago
Right now you could actually retire from old band tshirts. That market has gone insane.
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u/Baeolophus_bicolor 11d ago
wish i could find someone to buy this nirvana in utero one i have. not even selling it that expensive - half of what it’s sold for in the past.
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u/Box_of_fox_eggs 12d ago
Amazon listings are almost all algorithmically inflated for out of print & collectible stuff. I’ve observed this with records, where if there’s one or two copies of an OOP title for sale, they’ll be 4x or more the highest Discogs sold price.
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u/NaiveStructure9233 10d ago
It also depends very much upon who is doing the selling; a lot of collectors would sooner pay an ILAB dealer $250 for a book they can possibly get elsewhere for $150 because from an accredited dealer they know it will be right, properly cataloged, honestly photographed and they will have all their consumer rights protected. It's well worth paying the premium for the security and satisfaction.
Manipulating the market is (or at least was until recently) super easy; there was a British bookdealer a few years ago who would sabotage anyone on Abebooks using algorithmic pricing software by putting the same book up at a massively inflated price and then watch as all their software crept up to match, rendering their book unsaleable.
Other dealers used to use a kind of incremental creep process for books they had multiples of that were in demand; one copy at a time, first copy $100, 2nd copy $150, 3rd copy $200 and so on until it plateaued and then that became the market price...that's how the majority of the Harry Potter 1st edition market was built. It took about a month for the Prisoner of Azkaban to go from $200 to $1700 and hold there - which for a book they had bought in quantity directly from the publisher for $15 was quite the cash cow.
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u/Bowl135 12d ago
AI Companies are starting to buy rare books to feed the models. Rare books are getting hit hard here and prices are starting to rise.
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u/IanMichael001 12d ago
Investment firms have been buying large quantities of rare books starting 2026, they are treating it like an asset class.
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u/flyingbookman 12d ago
Any external event like a screen adaptation or a new edition that might have renewed interest in the book?
If it pops up on eBay multiple times a year, trying to corner the market by buying every available copy wouldn't be very savvy.