Oddity of the day

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

This from Gatermann:

Um, why is your book selling for $55 at ebay and also the normal price? I found this while doing a search for your book to see if they had used copies for sale at Amazon and this popped up.

Then, on my own, I found this.

Yikes! $72.50!? I guess someone really likes it?

And you know what they say, if something saves you a lot of money, then it ought to cost a lot of money as well…

But seriously, it would appear that for some reason, someone’s decided the UK version (or perhaps some variant of the UK version that I’m unaware of) of the book is collectible. Who knows why. Maybe there was a small run with a misprint that was quickly corrected. I can’t imagine anyone collecting O’Reilly books, but I guess if people are going to collect computer books, O’Reilly has more mystique than most publishers.

It kind of makes me wonder what one of the tech-review copies would sell for. After all, there were only a half-dozen or so of those in existence (and even I don’t have one of those–I had it in PDF form). While not substantially different from what ended up on the shelves, there were changes.

Paying two or three times the cover price of a book published in 1999 seems, well, odd. Especially seeing as the book is still available.

I’ve e-mailed the book dealer to ask why that is, because now I’m really curious. Not to mention amused.

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