Baffled and Boggled

[janedavitt]

There's a paperback copy of my fantasy/historical book 'Spoken from the Heart' for sale on Amazon for $140.72.

That's just stupid. For one thing, why the 72 cents, and for another, you can buy it for around $15.00 new so who in their right minds would pay that?

I'm baffled.

Comments

[simplyn2deep]

typo when entering the amount? maybe they mean $14.72?

sometimes I like to throw in the odd cent when making up prices for stuff I'm selling, but for the most part, I like to keep it at .00 or .50

[janedavitt]

This might explain it :-)

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

[simplyn2deep]

okay...makes sense.

the lack of "built in sanity check" made me laugh

[janedavitt]

It was such a funny article :-0

[green_grrl]

I see that happen with Amazon's resellers a lot. I'm guessing there's some sort of automated thing that keeps track of when there's only one copy available and it jacks the price, on the theory of someone will pay if they really want it. (Personally I just hop over to Abe's or Thriftvooks or Powells and they usually have it at a reasonable price. ;-)

[janedavitt]

I use Thrift Books a lot and the shipping is very reasonable too.

[realpestilence]

I'm checking that site out, now-it says free shipping in the US, so that immediately snagged my attention.

All I do is browse 99% of the time, but still.

[janedavitt]

Sadly, not free to Canada, but it's pretty reasonable and they discount if you get more than one from the same place.

[siria]

There are pricing algorithms in use by a lot of the third party sellers that can create such unusually high prices when they're not monitored by people. There's a good blog post here that explains how a biology textbook could end up being priced at $23,698,655.93 (+ $3.99 shipping).

[janedavitt]

Thank you for the link! It's such an intriguingly flawed system....