Oh my goodness 
Why is it priced so high?
Hi,
I suspect the reason the prices are so high is because the sellers are using automatic pricing software, rather than actually going to the effort to find out a price for which they might manage to sell the book.
So far as I understand it, this type of software skims through lots of listings of other online booksellers catalogues to see how often a particular title shows up (and how many copies). The software then sets a price based on the
perceived rarity of the book. The software (and the seller using it) don't really think about whether the price is sensible -- it's just the result of a data mining algorithm.
Most sensible people looking for a book will probably have an idea of what's a reasonable price, or will try to find out from fellow enthusiasts what a reasonable price might be (which is what started off this thread
). And those sensible people will sensibly refuse to pay such ridiculous prices. But from the sellers point of view, in the true spirit of capitalism, if there are people out there stupid enough to pay the laughably high prices, the sellers are smart enough to take their money. The 'value' is set by what the 'market' will bear.
@Wesley Meyers: IMHO, you're far better off making a reasonable offer to skypurr (Elaine) for her spare copy than paying the silly prices asked by those sellers going through Amazon.
Playmobil.de had the book available at a substantial discount the last time I checked, but that's only the German-language version -- not much help if you can't read German. But the pictures are still neat.
Cheers,
AndrewL
