What the hell is textbook arbitrage on eBay? It the Final Day of Textbook Return and time to make some money..
Arbitrage In economics and finance, is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.
In textbook arbitrage on eBay I was taking the profit of the price difference between two markets. I was buying textbooks cheap from the local bookstore or from classmates for around $20. Then I would resell them on eBay. I would take nice pictures pulling the information from the books identification number and sell it for 50-$80. There was lots of imbalance in the marketplace. Sometimes people would list their books on eBay and not include a books identification number. I could buy the book cheap on eBay and then re-list it on eBay with a better picture and description and get two or three times the price I paid for the book.
The eBay marketplace is not so entrepreneurial anymore. It’s more of a black-market. A number of companies have also sprung up in the used textbook market. The whole textbook market is kind of goofy. Publishers charge students upwards of $200 a book and then a few weeks later when the course is ended the bookstore buys back the book for $20.
“We think it’s frightening, and it’s wrong, that the same American textbooks our stores buy here for $100 can be shipped in from some other country for $50,” said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the association. “It represents price-gouging of the American public generally and college students in particular.”
There is still a large market imbalance within the textbook industry.
“But thanks to the Internet, more and more individual students and college bookstores are starting to order textbooks from abroad — and a few entrepreneurs, including Mr. Sarkis and his friends, have begun what are essentially arbitrage businesses to exploit the price differentials.
We couldn’t understand why what costs $120 here should cost $50-something there,”
However, doing textbook arbitrage on eBay really isn’t very lucrative because it requires a lot of time to find the deals then confirm that you have a place to sell it ( local bookstore needs it or it is still being used in the curriculum) it’s hard to scale a business model like this because a lot of the information is kept proprietary to publishers which make it hard to determine which books to buy and how much they will sell for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK.html