{"id":9951,"date":"2011-06-21T00:09:05","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T04:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9951"},"modified":"2012-07-07T11:10:02","modified_gmt":"2012-07-07T16:10:02","slug":"would-you-pay-23698655-93-for-a-book-about-flies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/21\/would-you-pay-23698655-93-for-a-book-about-flies\/","title":{"rendered":"Would you pay $23,698,655.93 for a book about flies?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This link was sent to one of my various mailing lists. It’s an amusing little story about a very<\/em> expensive book<\/a> and how the price on eBay got so out of hand:<\/p>\n

\n

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence\u2019s The Making of a Fly<\/em> — a classic work in developmental biology that we — and most other Drosophila<\/em> developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.<\/p>\n

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?<\/p>\n

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This link was sent to one of my various mailing lists. It’s an amusing little story about a very expensive book and how the price on eBay got so out of hand: A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,28,15],"tags":[833,60,92],"class_list":["post-9951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-media","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-ebay","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Av","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9951"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15878,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9951\/revisions\/15878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}