(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
It’s not yet an addiction but eBay second-hand books are really really attractive
2023-11-18 21:07:21+00:00
I could say in my “in my teens” but it’s more meaningful to say “30 to 40 years ago” there were few things I enjoyed more as a young nerd than finding a first- or secondhand bookshop and browsing it for several hours on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon; quite a lot of my library of slightly foxed and yellowed pelican and penguin paperbacks come from that era, and more than a few textbooks too.
But it’s having a toddler which has brought me back to sourcing large numbers of books for cheap:
THAT’S NOT MY $CREATURE! ITS $BODYPART IS TOO $TEXTURE!
– not to mention the obligatory Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler library which every small child must own; finding that you can mass buy them for £3 (+ bulk discount) each as opposed to 7 or 8 quid new, greatly de-risking the eventuality of your child shredding pages or vomiting Weetabix onto it.
But where this has led is a selection of arcane queries looking for cheap copies of stuff that I should have read for £25 in the early 2000s, again now at about £3 each.
It certainly doesn’t have the sensual appeal of a room with creaking floorboards and cloistered with overloaded shelves; but it is a bit like a candy shop.
But I still don’t understand where the profit margin comes from, given the cost of postage.
[END]
[1] URL:
https://alecmuffett.com/article/108401
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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