Chiff and Fipple Forums

Hello,

I would like to buy a copy of Pat Sky's "A Manual for the Irish Uilleann Pipes."

If you have a copy you might want to sell, please send me a private message, and accept my thanks,

A.C.

There's one on Amazon. At a price

£11,415.88

And several more through bookfinder.com, all using the same outrageous price algorithm

My Dear Mr. Gumby,

Perhaps, in haste, you had not noticed that some of those quoted prices include shipping.

All the best,

A.C.

Surely an error £11k seems a bit steep.

m coulter wrote:Surely an error £11k seems a bit steep.

Indeed. Amazon.com has it for only $11,106.80, which should be a mere £7.5k.

And only £3.00 to ship it to the UK. Presumably that doesn't include insurance.

Where are you located? I see that many libraries have the book, both the 1980 and the 2000 editions. Perhaps cheaper and easier to borrow the book and copy it if it is out of print.

m coulter wrote:Surely an error £11k seems a bit steep.

As an author with books on Amazon, I might have some insight here.

Amazon allows third party sellers, and there are some companies which use automation to set their prices. When a book goes out of print, some of those robots will raise the price of their copy a little. Other robots will notice this, and also raise their prices. This can get into a ridiculous 'bidding war', with the items ending up with unreasonable prices that no one will ever pay.

I once had one of my books out of stock for about 8 hours. During that time, the price on a couple 3rd party sellers rose to around $7,000.

It reminds me of the old joke about the kid selling cups of lemonade on the side of the road for a million dollars each. When asked "How many people do you think are going to buy lemonade at that price?", the kid replies "I only need one."