7Wannabe5- Take 6

Where are you and where are you going?
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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

yeah he hosts this board itself :lol:

that scenario you describe might be the downside of divided focus.

so did you retrieve or sell off? (just curious)

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

Alphaville wrote:
Fri Nov 13, 2020 11:58 am
yeah he hosts this board itself :lol:
Uh-oh, I take back everything I ever said about him on this forum. In short order I'll resume my Prime membership, reinstall my Ring security system, start shopping at Whole Foods, buy all of my shoes from Zappos, get all my audiobooks from Audible, and of course finally get one of those Alexa things the kids have been asking for, and sign up for a WaPo subscription.

(I hadn't realized until I did my little Wikipedia search for stuff Amazon/Bezos owns that they own AbeBooks; I'm devastated--I really liked AbeBooks.)

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

don’t blame him personally— it’s just randomness and power laws and network effects. not long ago the big villain was walmart, and before that, someone else. remember borders books being bought by kmart?

we live in a winner-takes-all system, he happens to be the current king of the cage but will be dethroned in turn by someone... bigger. future alibaba might make you miss the good ole days of amazon as “quaint”.

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

Well, personally, I've got everything I need within walking distance, in brick-and-mortar form, not owned by Bezos (at least, I don't think so)--EXCEPT, the random out-of-print book my 2 local book retailers can't order for me. That's where AbeBooks came in handy.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

ah. maybe chief librarian @7w5 will be able to hook you up in a not-so-distant future.

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

I was thinking the same thing.

We really should set up some sort of ERE book exchange/library program; there's gotta be some way to do it while maintaining anonymity.

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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

im more interested in the story of @7w5 striking it rich by scoring some undiscovered incunabula or something hahahahaha

maybe via etsy?

etsyTM an amazon company :lol:

but srsly:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/889987336/ ... s-hunter-s

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

random question for chief librarian 7 of 5: i have a 1943 edition of the little prince (in french) published in new york. (quelle surprise!)

is it worth any money? (i’m not selling it, just curious about the publishing history of this book during nazi occupation)
Last edited by Alphaville on Fri Nov 13, 2020 12:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Fri Nov 13, 2020 12:33 pm
See viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6255
Nice! (Should have known there was something on here.)

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

Also, should have known to check this forum a couple months ago when DS broke his arm and we needed bubble wrap for his soccer games, because the refs wouldn't let him play unless we wrapped the cast.
viewtopic.php?p=217185#p217185
Massive, very big, ginormous ERE fail that I actually spent ~$16 on a roll of bubble wrap at Home Depot, because that's just one of those things I'd never think to hold on to when someone ships me something.

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Alphaville:

It just amuses me to imagine Bezos as my arch-nemesis, because he is so much above my weight class I can do him all sorts of cartoon steamroller violence in my mind without feeling guilty. I did, however, make use of a bit of stern vocabulary in my letters to his minions. I chose a mix of ship-back and auction. The remnants of the remnants of my inventory are currently being hoard stored by my now back to just somewhat kooky status sister. We specialized in books on lost arts and crafts, so the collection also serves as a sort of potential post-collapse archive.

I am totally jacked up on steroids, so everything seems possible at the moment. Lightbulb just went off that this might be the right time for me to revive idea to start copyright mining enterprise. I am already planning to Snowbird Discount Camp on the white beaches of bird preserve in South Carolina as soon as I can get vaccinated, so I could also plan on going to D.C. to start my research!

@Hristo:

When I first started out as an internet book dealer in 2002, there were many independent venues. I sold books on Amazon, Alibris, AbBooks, half.com, eBay etc. The invention of universal book identification numbers by Amazon led to the commodification of the rare book market and eventually left Amazon as the only game in town.

BTW, I am enjoying “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist.” However, it is seriously reviving some thoughts I’ve had on the theme of why NT-male/NF-female relationships work better than NF-male/NT-female relationships. Most of my relationships that have been romantic beyond the level of sexual infatuation have been with men who are more F ( and also more T for turbulent) than me. I think this is because in order to have a romantic relationship, the two parties have to ante up a certain amount of F together, and me and a guy with even less F than me can’t get it done. Anyways, I was thinking about this because I am so clearly one of the scientific-mathematical style environmentalists who greatly irritate Kingsnorth. It makes for a kind of funny dichotomy or trichotomy when my nerdiness annoys more poetic/idealist men, because I feel like because I am the female I am actually more like nature than a man. Babbling here...

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

wtf.... https://www.ebay.com/itm/193717670651?u ... noapp=true

srsly?

(mine is in french btw)

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

alibris is amazon free...

https://t.alibris.com/booksearch?nowork ... ery=&wpub=

damn my adhd hahahahaha

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

AddAll used book search is best first source for current valuation. Also provides some links to independent dealers for orders. Race to the bottom AND collusion are both rampant in used/rare book market. With a popular classic like “The Little Prince”, it’s usually going to take a while to get your price.

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Alibris is not Amazon free because all pricing reverts to Amazon.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

ahhhhh

but see here is the part that’s interesting to me for your thread—you have expert knowledge in this shit

i paid $2 for my petit prince in oh..., a used bookstore on 18th st (there used to be many). i thought they missed something by the fact alone that it was a first edition. but that’s besides the point.

seems to me that amazon created a sort of... “world market”? as market makers they profit by default. but markets are not really efficient so there are hidden asymmmetries to be exploited by experts, no? perhaps less so than in then past but not gone.

seems to me that you could run a small profitable side gig by zeroing out storage cost—no? drip, drip, drip?

Hristo Botev
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Hristo Botev »

@7w5: DW just ordered "Recovering Environmentalist" for me a couple of days ago, as the kids' school's book fair is going on, which means our local book retailer gives a kickback to our kids' school when we buy through them. I'm looking forward to reading it, as the couple of folks in my IRL circle who've actually heard of Kingsnorth before, it's because of that book.

As for the NF/NT NT/NF stuff, I don't really follow (as in, I don't know what those letters mean apart from a vague understanding that they have something to do with personality types). Certainly there's not really a scientific/mathematical bone in my body, whereas DW works in the medical field and always sends the kids over my way whenever the kids have a question about history, literature, or art. But, that's not to say that DW isn't creative as hell; she certainly is--she always manages to "win" whenever we do our little around the dinner-table family poetry slams.

@Alphaville: I've got The Little Prince in Bulgarian?

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by Alphaville »

don’t worry about the science of types—there’s as much science in it as in horoscopes :P :lol:

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 6

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Alphaville:

When we were handling our own inventory storage, picking, packing, and shipping, it covered the entire floor of a large barn, 4 X4 stacks of banker boxes each holding up to 40 lbs of books, on array of wooden pallets. I paid my own kids and a couple of their friends to do most of the grunt work, shipping, and some of the data entry. My expert skill at book scouting in isolation pays well, but if I water it down doing all the other work myself, these-a-days I can’t do much better than I make substitute teaching, and Amazon’s shipping requirements are also less flexible and more demanding than substitute teaching.

An additional factor would be that I have moved on myself to liking e-books as well for some purposes as paper. I was never a fiddly sort of antiquarian or first edition icon dealer. Much more interested in any condition or sort of book that contained obscure information or had limited printing.

@Hristo:

Sorry. That nt/nf babbling wasn’t really meant for you. I am just processing through reflective relationship breakup mode on steroids :oops:

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