Sometimes a Great Notion Aka A FREE Offer!!
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By Bruce McKinney
The used book business has been a predictable business since the day after Gutenberg printed the first book. "I have a nice copy in original boards. The Count who bought it thought it had pictures." With that, the used book business was born and it has remained remarkably unchanged.
What have changed are the prices. And as prices have increased so too have buyer expectations. At ten dollars anything you say is fine. At a thousand dollars I'd like to see it in writing. It's understandable.
Higher prices carry with them the expectation of more professional cataloguing. To ask more you need to say more. Many sellers crib the descriptions of other copies and often this is apparent to buyers who can not be impressed. It is simply lip-synching. So how can you quickly and effectively research a title? One way and frankly the best way, is to see if we have a sequence of listings pertaining to this title in our database, the AED. If we do you can look for those descriptions that make your case for importance and valuation. Build your description with interesting and informative "quotes". If you can explain it then others can understand it. This is how you build client relationships and sell books.
All books have a pricing history and it is not simply the array of prices on listing sites today. If a copy at auction recently sold for $300 then listing your book for $800 is probably too high even if others are listing their book around that price. You need to know this history. On AE all book and ephemera auctions worldwide are posted ahead of the sale, priced after the sale, and then immediately added to the database for reference. Our records stay current.
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Sometimes a Great Notion Aka A FREE Offer!!
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In addition to current auctions there are extensive full text descriptions from bibliographies, collector, dealer and past auction catalogues available in the AED. It is easy and fast to use and very inexpensive. To encourage you to see how it can help establish valuation and improve your descriptions we are making the almost 900,000 full text records fully accessible from October 1st to November 10th to everyone who signs up [or already has signed-up] as a free member. Simply sign up and then sign-in! If you find it useful then sign up for an annual membership at the current price, $114, and save the $27 increase that takes effect on November 11th. All subscriptions committed in this period expire on November 10th, 2005 so signing up ahead of the deadline imposes no disadvantage to those signing up early. It is the single best tool ever created for building interesting book descriptions.
As an added bonus we are introducing additional software to facilitate your auction research. It is an Auction/Database Comparison. Search any term such as Chattanooga or a phrase like War of 1812 in the Keyword Search box for upcoming auctions at the top of the screen and we provide an option in the results screen to search the same term in the AED. We'll show you how many records we have that contain this term and, if you are signed in, provide a link to these records. This is very useful and quick and another example of the book research methodologies we are developing on this site.
Whatever your book or ephemera interest the revolution in rare book information is happening here. Join today!
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