Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
The Means of Book Trading That Dares Not Speak Its Name: eBay
Barlow: “I buy a lot on eBay. I have received positive feedback from over 1,700 different people that I dealt with. [Editor’s Note: people on both sides of the transaction – buyers and sellers – can receive feedback or be rated by each other.] I have probably conducted somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 eBay transactions. These numbers aren’t reflected in my feedback total as about one third of people don’t give feedback, nor do repeat sellers give repeated feedback – they only “rate” you once.”
Dealer Y: “I’ve bought approximately 300 or so items, almost entirely books. Of these, maybe 50% were for the store and 50% were for my private collection.”
SPECIAL SEARCH TECHNIQUES ON EBAY
Barlow: “Do I have any special methods of searching for material on eBay? Yes I do. Definitely. One thing I do is I use the eBay category that allows you to save favorite searches (so I don’t have to keep reconstructing them) and I run these searches perhaps once per week. Another thing I do is use exclusionary keyword searches. For instance with Baskerville one thing that comes up often is Conan Doyle [author of Hound of the Baskervilles]. So I perform searches like “Baskerville minus Hound” and that cuts down on the amount of Conan Doyle material that comes up.”
Barlow: “And my search techniques have changed over the years. My search techniques keep being refined and also eBay keeps refining its tools and abilities. For instance now you can search by bidders. You can find out what pieces other people in your collecting area who usually bid against you are bidding on and go to that item in case you’ve missed it.” [Editor’s Note: I ask him if that’s blockable, as I wouldn’t want my competitors to be able to see and track my finds. “Not that I know of,” he replies.]
Dealer Y: “I keep an ongoing list of things I’m looking for and run searches for that list on a regular basis. I also tend to search broadly, not narrowly, as I find if you search too narrowly you miss many items. Often I search by title or description, or by personal names. I’d rather get too many hits and rule out items than miss the one item I might want. Boolean reductions [Editor’s Note: in simplest terms, using and, or, but, etc. to modify a search] reduce too much in my specialized field. This might not be true though were I doing another search, say for Shakespeare or Hemingway. But I’m searching within a very circumscribed area and I find that often just personal name [of the artist or subject] is enough to bring up what I want.”
Dealer Y: “I also sort my searches to search by the highest price, as I’m only or primarily interested in signed, limited, or association copies. Sorting by highest price omits the $25 items, which are not going to be what I want. I expect to spend at least $100 per item and I have no reason to look at the lower end.”
DO THEY USE SNIPING TECHNOLOGY? IF SO, WHY?
Librarian X: “I use an ‘Electronic Gizmo’ that I don’t want to reveal. It enables you to bid in a last few seconds of an auction: you don’t have to physically be there, you just put in am amount and it knows when auctions will be and places your bid. The plus of this is that it takes stress off of you – you don’t have to keep watching it and you can avoid the odd hours of some sales. You are also able to bid on more quality stuff and not miss things. I found my ‘Electronic Gizmo’ by hearing someone mention the phrase ‘auction sniper’, for which I did a Google search.”
