3/9/2004

MICRO-MICROECONOMICS

So I took a day off today, after working the last 18 days in a row. I drove down to the People’s Republic of Madison and sold off some books at a used-book store. I took in four bags of books and walked out with one bag of books and a very small amount of cash.

Now I can’t decide if I got a good deal or not. I can see both sides of this.

On the “good deal” side of things, I essentially traded four bags full of books I don’t read anymore for one bag full of books I’ll at least read once. (I’ve gotten more careful about my book-buying over the years; if I don’t think I’ll read a book more than once, I usually won’t buy it.) I gained shelf space, I reduced clutter, and I had enough extra cash after the transaction to buy a cup of coffee for the drive home.

On the “bad deal” side of the ledger, I traded a lot of my property for a little of somebody else’s. The books I traded in were worth a lot more (at original prices) than the books I bought, if only because the difference in number was so great.

So what say you, readers–did I make a good deal, or no?

Posted by Mark @ 4:17 pm | | Permalink
This post is filed under: General

4 Comments

  1. Good deal. Selling the 4 bags of unused books gets you a lot more utility than keeping them, from your description.

    Its only a bad deal if you think there was some other way to get more money value, like selling them on Ebay or something.

    Or conceivably you could have gotten a lot of good feelings by giving them away to someone or some place.

    Comment by Jim Roberts-Miller — 3/9/2004 @ 7:09 pm

  2. Books’ value is rarely measured in financial terms, and it often rises through potentiality; the value of an average unread book can be higher, I find, than an average already-devoured one. You get the delicious anticipation of a pile of new reading. And since you’ve bought them used and with trade-in of books that you no longer have use for, if they’re not as good as you’d hoped, you can stop reading it with very little downside. And if at least one of the new acquisitions ends up being a real keeper, then you’ve won big.

    Comment by Vidiot — 3/9/2004 @ 10:17 pm

  3. Even if he could have gotten more for them on eBay and possibly gotten the books he bought for less, there is something positive about the experience of being able to leaf through books before you buy them. I generally won’t buy a book by an author I don’t know unless I’ve had a chance to read the first chapter.

    Plus, bumming around Madison is fun.

    Comment by Dave — 3/10/2004 @ 12:29 am

  4. As the former owner of a used book store, I can tell you that the bookstore owner got the better deal financially. He or she would not have traded otherwise. But that doesn’t mean you got shafted. If you traded books you didn’t want for books that you do want, you came out with more than you took in. Your only concern then is whether you got as much as you could have. Book buying is a pretty cut-and-dried affair: bookstore owners typically offer one-quarter to one-third what they think they can sell the book for (they have overhead, after all). So you probably wouldn’t have done significantly better at any other general used bookstore. Bottom line, IMHO, if you don’t think you’ll want to keep the book permanently, check it out of the library.

    Comment by Liz — 3/11/2004 @ 1:13 am

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