I've not been blogging much lately -- though the reason for my slowdown is a matter for another day. Tonight, as I was describing to friend what had been happening in my life the last couple of months, I realized that I had the makings for a good blog entry, one that would cure my blogging drought.<\/p>\n
My name is Raymond Yee, and I am a half.com\/ebay addict.<\/p>\n
As with many addictions, it all started innocently enough. In August, I wrote about giving my books away to people<\/a> who could make good use of them. Around that time, one of my housemates told me about half.com<\/a> (which was owned by ebay), where he was selling off his books. I had never sold anything on ebay but had bought a CD-ROM and a computer cable on that site. I knew how popular the company had become through creating essentially the world's largest garage sale. But I have never been a fan of flea markets. Moreover, I had never sold any of my books, accumulating them as I go. But being the Web geek that I am, I was always up for trying out something new on the internet -- and placed one of my old physics books up for sale on half.com.<\/p>\n Nothing happened for weeks until one night, I got email from half.com. \"Funny\", I thought. \"I didn't buy anything there -- why am I getting email?\" Well, it was a message saying that someone had bought my book! The rush that came from having someone out who I will likely never meet be willing to pay much more for an old book that I ever imagined getting for it laid the foundation for my addictive ruin. These books that I had been planning to just give away (to worthy folks, of course) had monetary value that wasn't that<\/i> difficult to extract.<\/p>\n I packaged up the book, made my way to the post office a couple of days later, and sent it off. I should be seeing the $30 I was paid soon. I guess that I hadn't lost that much money from the purchase. Sure, I probably shouldn't have bought the book in the first place. I had a soft spot for advanced physics and math and computer texts -- and I tried to steer myself away from those dens of iniquity (a.k.a. bookstores) where I knew I'd succumb to temptation. I even had told myself that the real costs of the books weren't the list price of the books -- but the 100-200 hours (and that's optimistic) it would take to master the materials of the books -- and hence, the real question at stake was whether I had scheduled that time into my life by buying the book. (Of course, I hadn't!)<\/p>\n But now, half.com redeems some of my experience -- at least partially. It seems that the resale value of physics books is fairly high -- or at least much higher than what I had naively believed it to be. I can't imagine getting that much money from the used bookstores around campus. Still, as I packaged up the third book that I've sold in the last couple of weeks, I could not help noticing that the only marks in the book was my own name. I had been living a fantasy that I would become a master of solid state physics by buying the book. Slowly, I struggle to give up that illusion. When I was a Ph.D. student in biophysics, working for a theoretical chemists, at the peak of my scientific \"prowess\" (such as it was), I couldn't find the time and energy to master arcane topics like the condensed matter physics of complex fluids. Over seven years later, with my mind immersed in totally different fields (which I find overwhelming enough), what chance do I have to study physics seriously? The time has come and gone -- and yes, I am flourishing quite well, thank you very much, without physics. (When I was a kid, I never imagined that I would be happy without math and physics being at the center of my life....)<\/p>\n So I'm on a tear to sell off most of my books. My current inventory is around twenty books. I can see placing dozens more books before I'm done. I surprised myself this morning by using the repricing mode on the books. How much time should I be spending tweaking my selling price for various books? My housemate's strategy has been to sell his books at cut rate prices. When I started with half.com, I thought that I would use the same procedure. Now I am trying to squeeze some more dollars out of my inventory. <\/p>\n Odd, isn't it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve not been blogging much lately — though the reason for my slowdown is a matter for another day. Tonight, as I was describing to friend what had been happening in my life the last couple of months, I realized … Continue reading