There are other ways to sell and they need to be mentioned. For those who are well organized and patient, and armed with determination and stamina there are the listing sites. Descriptive standards are relatively high. Prospective sellers prepare detailed descriptions and post them, occasionally with an image, to one of the listing sites and sometimes to several. They then wait, for their listings are simply the baited hook, and the great variable is time. For older non-fiction material the informal rule is that if there are more than seven copies for sale on line you are in for a long wait, a wait measured in years, not months. For fiction, for which there are more collectors, this number seems to be fifteen. Many, many titles have many times these numbers of copies for sale on the listing sites today. They have no reasonable chance of sale except at low prices.

Your “cash” alternative has been to sell at auction. For a small minority of collectors their material will light up the auction rooms, push the cataloguers to descriptive ecstasy, challenge the catalogue designers and bring bids cascading in from two or three continents. For other collectors, and in particular those who have purchased from reputable dealers, their material will find appropriate auction options among the more than seventy auction houses who regularly conduct book sales. For the rest of us, the logical auction option is eBay.

While the seller studies and prepares, buyers also need to prepare. There are tens of thousands of new listings every week on eBay. No one can read them all and probably few want to. For everyone else there are lightning fast, highly effective diagnostic tools and you need to use them. We provide a very effective set of tools – KEYWORDS and modifiers that look at the full text descriptions of all book lots offered on eBay and show you matches when we find your term(s) in a lot. As a test I have used Poughkeepsie, a name that is hard to confuse with anything else, and recently bought two wonderful gems for a total of $17.50. Okay, the world was not beating down the door to outbid me on Uncle Tom’s Adventure in a Hollow Log, published by the author (I already figured that out!) in Poughkeepsie in 1881. I’ll bet the Gutenberg Bible is common by comparison. For this 72-page rarity I paid $5.00 after impetuously committing the price of a value meal in the bidding. It was inexpensive in part because it was out of place. The seller’s other material was eclectic: just boxes of stuff to sell. Using KEYWORDS I cut right through the millions of descriptive words in the book lots to find – voila – the ones of interest. All my time was then used to evaluate the piece by checking on ABEto be sure there weren’t a hundred other copies for sale and then looking in the ÆD for any references to the author, title and printer. I found nothing and knew this baby was UNCOMMON.