Bookjackers - rent seekers without ethics
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There are sellers (Thrift Books comes to mind first) who spend little time describing books and use stock photos to list high volumes of books at low prices. Their business model is not mine. Their descriptions are vague, not wildly inaccurate.
“Mass Market Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear.”
Somewhere between being left unclaimed at a bus station and new. But importantly they guarantee what they sell. Their broad descriptions must work as they claim to have sold 160 million books worldwide. The worst thing that you’d read about them is that they sent a book that didn’t match the description. Every time with the customer praising their customer service and having received a refund.
Bookjackers are the target of my ire. I’ll try to describe how they operate.
Bookjackers use bots, scripts, or APSs to scrape book listings from legitimate listings. Their software identifies books with potential profit margins. They don’t target every book.
Often one physical copy of a book may be represented by a dozen additional listings, all with vague descriptions, at inflated prices. These bookjackers don’t own their inventory and place orders through legitimate sellers with instructions to ship directly to the customer. They rely on mass listings, across multiple platforms, with some entities operating multiple LLCs to overwhelm the market for a title. With a preposterously large inventory, using algorithms to their advantage, and scraping software that pulls prices in real time, bookjackers rely on scale and platforms that reward volume much more than they would punish cancellations, returns or customer feedback. With no money tied up in inventory, their risks are few.
Legitimate sellers are split on whether to fill such orders. Many contend that they are receiving the price that they asked, why worry that the ultimate customer overpayed. Others, look beyond that one transaction to broader sentiments shared by the book buying public, from reddit forums to eBay customer feedback. It doesn’t require much effort to find criticism of the most widely used platforms to sell books. The Amazon owned ABE Books is home to both bookjackers and the most respected curators of book culture, booksellers with sterling reputations earned before the invention of the internet. The former sully the reputation of us all.
In the bookselling community of which I am most familiar – anybody selling books in or near Rochester, NY – most all of us who sell used books are here, those with large warehouses of large collections, brick and mortar shops, smaller players with a side-hustle and non-profits, as well as a bookjacker.
It is wide assortment of curmudgeons as well as some of the kindest people you'd ever meet. Judging by the prevalence of book scanning devices I see out in public, this is a growing group of people, with all sorts of skill sets and specializations. None of us share anything in common with bookjackers. All of us are engaged in arbitrage of something tangible, a book we've identified to sell that sits on a shelf for us to grab when we've sold it. These outliers - bookjackers - are rent seekers, the hubris of the internet age, adding no value but expecting to extract profit.
The software used to automate the harvesting of book listings is available whether you want a free and open source approach like Beautiful Soup (Python) , Selenium, or Scrapy, or the Web Scraper Chrome Extension, for those without programming experience. Paid options include Octoparse, Parsehub or Bright Data. There are GitHub projects that are free, open-source scripts.
These are tools. How you use them, for good or evil in the world, is the burden you bear and the choice you make. Some choices run afoul of use agreements. Bookjackers run afoul of standards that I choose to uphold, values that are important to me and other members of the IOBA, “an international trade association dedicated to ethical business practices that promote customer confidence”
We are vetted. We have an 11-point code of ethics. We are an active community that always has conversations about the best way to be ethical and transparent booksellers.