Seacoast History Blog #64
September 12, 2009

I read a lot more history books than I write. Or I should say, I have them read to me. Years ago, a $35 (or up) nonfiction audio book was a total treat. Now I’m drinking them in like Kool-Aid on a hot day. What happened? Amazon happened, and as guilty as it makes me feel, I’m taking advantage of a crazy niche of sellers advertising nearly-new recorded books for a little as a penny. (Continued below).

This isn’t one of these penny monthly book club things. You have to pay postage, currently $3,99. So a penny CD comes to a total of $4. The economics of the thing eludes me. Apparently the sellers buy large quantities of overstock or used products for a few cents each, let’s say 25 cents for a an audio cassette that sold originally at $25. The dealer then puts the item up for sale on Amazon.com. By posting it at one cent, or a few pennies more, this dealer’s sale goes right to the top of the pile as the cheapest item of its kind. Many other buyers may be selling the exact book for much more. But we buyers are lazy bargain hunters who rarely scroll down the web page or pay more when offered something cheap and accessible.

You can find the same kind of underselling at eBay, but buyers should beware. While eBay sellers can name their own shipping rate, Amazon limits the seller to postage of $3.99 per unit on most books, audio cassettes, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs. The seller must then make all his or her income from the mailing income, usually using media mail that may cost half the money Amazon allots for the postage. The seller still has to package the item well and durable mailing envelopes can sell for a dime to a dollar each. Some sellers recycle old bubble packs, or cut down cardboard boxes.

Still in a perfect world, the seller cannot be earning more than $1-$2 per sale. He or she must buy, warehouse, package and ship the items, plus do all the paperwork. Sure Amazon.com does the advertising and much of the virtual invoicing, but they also take a small cut.

I tend to buy history CDs, but you can buy anything. Bestselling books may have many sellers with rock bottom prices. I buy lots of audio cassettes since they are in less demand. I recently splurged on an ex-library copy of Upton Sinclair’s "The Jungle". I paid $5 plus postage for 11 cassettes totaling 15.75 hours of beautifully read prose by voice talent George Guidall. Originally the package sold for nearly $100.

Thanks to the extraordinary software on Amazon, you can pick exactly the category and media you want – from Romance books to Biography on CD. Once you isolate your genre, then just click to sort the items so that the lowest cost books appear first.

If I really want an item, I’m happy to pay full rate. But usually I am just filling my working hours with background reading, so I’m not picky. I usually search down the list from a penny to a $2 maximum, knowing I will pay $3.99 postage for each item.

A few years back I ordered a book from Amazon and it was delivered by a Portsmouth neighbor. By dropping off the book, he said, he could keep the whole postage fee. Although he was selling books for as little as a quarter, at the time, he and his wife were selling $50-$100 worth of books per day. You have to move a lot of inventory to make any money. But you don’t have to go to work.

I feel some guilt. The author is getting nothing. Writers get no portion of a resold book, and often get little or nothing for books sold as heavily discounted or discontinued. But they never have. Amazon didn’t invent the concept of ripping off authors, they just increased the marketplace. The question is whether such rapid undercutting of new books hurts sales. I assume it does. But we’re told that the increased sales via the Inernet ultimately adds, rather than detracts, from total sales, simply because Amazon is ubiquitous and so easy to order from.

Jeff Bezos, president of Amazon.com, has said that people will buy more books if they are easy to get and cheap. And, he contends, that the more books one buys cheap, the more likely one is to buy more costly books too. I must admit, this has been true in my own case. I used to buy a couple of books a year in bookstores and I still do. If something was costly, I went to the library. But now I pay to download them on Kindle, read them on GoogleBooks, and buy at least another half dozen used books or audio books per month since. Those six books cost me the price of a single book.

Following Bezos theory, I am more likely to purchase a new book if I have read an old book by the same author. Again, I must agree. And I sheepishly will admit that I’ve done so when the Amamzon.com robot sends me an email suggesting a new title based on its robot calculation from books I’ve purchased in the past. The more I buy, as the electronic marketing people tell us, the more accurately the robot can guess what new products I will purchase. And it is working.

I prefer unabrdged books, but beggars can’t be choosers. So far only ONE of the dozens of audiobooks I’ve purchased was defective. I emailed the seller who cheerfully refunded my ONE cent and the $3.99 shipping cost within minutes. 

Here, for example, are the history books I’ve purchased recently:

The Devil in the White City

Jefferson’s Demons

Katherine Graham’s Personal History

The Terrible Hours (about the Squalus)

The Secret Life of Houdini

Raising the Hunley

Empire of Blue Water

Land of Lincoln

Sea of Honor

A Magnificent Catastrophe

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.