Out of the few times I’ve looked to buy an old book on Amazon, I see a very high price listed to buy the book new. Why is that? Is it really that they are doing print-on-demand for you to buy a new book? No, absolutely that’s not how it works. The book really is out of print, it’s just that there are some professional book sellers who have new-old-stock (NOS) books where they can still make a claim to the book being “new.”
So, here’s where things get interesting and very specific to Amazon. These large book sellers are primarily looking for a quick way to empty their inventory, so they try to complete these sales as quickly as possible. Amazon provides this really nice AI-driven price-setting automation scheme to streamline this process, taking into account raising the price of rare books. Also, Amazon makes it real easy for third-party sellers to be listed together on a single prroduct page./
So, that’s how the forces play together to show high prices to buy the book new. No, it is not really “new” as in newly manufactured in the last few years, here “new” is solely applied as a legal de jure term.
Another note, some small-time authors really hate the implications of this Amazon system because it means that some folks who bought a copy of an old book they didn’t like and they wanted to remove from publication… yes, these folks can keep reselling their books on Amazon, for really high prices, and they can never remove their book from circulation. Well, yes, I’d have to say, that’s just too bad for the authors if they don’t like it, that’s the nature of publication. But yeah, you get the idea of the point I was trying to make, thinking on the side of some authors who want to go the way of proprietary publishing.
20201122/DuckDuckGo why do new copies of old books sell for so much
20201122/https://justpublishingadvice.com/why-are-they-selling-used-books-on-amazon-at-crazy-prices/
Wow, great deep dive into the costs of selling on Amazon. This is the reason why most Amazon merchandise sells for about $10.
20201122/https://medium.com/the-ascent/after-6-months-of-selling-books-on-amazon-this-is-how-much-i-made-d3c0b078f104