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Readers of this journal have probably seen it happen again and again: while hunting the internet for a particular used book, you find a number of reasonably priced copies offered from various dealers, then two or three priced at ridiculously high amounts. Sometimes, if the book is fairly common, you find dozens of copies with prices unbelievably out of whack. You may ask yourself, What is going on here? You take a closer look. Here’s a copy priced three times higher than ever

You were warned about it at all levels of your education, and students are expelled from colleges and universities for doing it. You have read about it in the style manuals you used in your education or workplace. In recent years, you have probably heard about historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, who were shamed by accusations of plagiarism and proofs of their guilt. And there are many other cases of less famous academics, novelists, and other authors who have

Before we launch into a serious and sustained consideration of the relatively new practice of mega-listing, which is of grave concern to many online professional booksellers, we need to define our terms a bit. Strictly speaking, mega-listers offer many books for sale through the major search services (ABE, Alibris, Amazon, etc.), through other portals, or through their own websites. To use a somewhat arbitrary but real number, 100,000 books constitutes “many” to most of us. T

This is a look at some indisputably large (as in over half a million titles) online book stores that sell on Abebooks.com. It reports on the number of listings; the Book Condition field and other noteworthy findings for the thirty most expensive and thirty least expensive listings; whether or not they provide dates and publishers in that group of listings; and the most highly priced Ernest Hemingway title. This is obviously not an exhaustive or scientific survey, but the find

Short identical questionnaires were sent to Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon, and they were kind enough to reply. A modified version was sent to the independent meta-search service AddALL, which did not respond. Abebooks Mega-Lister Questionnaire 1. How does Abebooks define mega-listers, and do you differentiate between categories of mega-listers? The terms we use to describe booksellers usually relate to the inventory they carry such as rare and antiquarian dealers, used bookse

-Tell us a little about yourself: My passion for paper started in the school playground, swapping comics, cigarette cards and later, ‘naughty’ postcards. In the mid 1960s, swathes of houses in my neighbourhood were being bulldozed to accommodate the motorcar, and these abandoned homes gave up all kinds of printed treasures. Along with the discarded books there were magazines, old documents, photographs, cigarette cards—in fact ephemera of every kind. As a teenager I found boo

A quick glance at the table of contents suggests this will be our Mega-lister Number, but it just kind of worked out that way. Gwen Foss posted an interesting glossary of mega-lister terms to a list some weeks ago, which led to the Standard soliciting an article on the topic. I will admit to some prejudice here, as I have been vexed by the phenomenon over the last couple years, first by an important purchase that fell through before I realized who (or what) I was dealing with

Weeding through countless fields of obsolete digital pics and scans on my hard drive, up popped a set of images from Herbarium and Plant Descriptions that reminded me what a pleasure it was to handle this item for awhile. I remember writing a fairly lengthy description for an eBay auction and starting it at $100. If the herbarium didn’t sell there I would have transplanted the work over to my regular book list, thus preserving more gleanings about the little girl who put it t