eBay Hacks — the latest of the O’Reilly Hacks series — is out. It runs down 99 tips and tricks for eBay, ranging from simple buying and selling techniques to advanced programming with the eBay API. I wrote the intro for this book, and I’m really pleased with how it came out:
eBay makes us all into participants in the market again. It’s no
coincidence that eBay’s first great wave of participation came from the
collectibles trade. The collectibles market occurs at the intersection
of luck (discovering a piece at a yard-sale or thrift shop), knowledge
(recognizing its value), market-sense (locating a buyer for the goods)
and salesmanship (describing the piece’s properties attractively). It
requires little startup capital and lots of smarts, something that each
of us possess in some measure.Somewhere, in the world’s attics and basements, are all the treasures
of history. Someone is using the Canopic jar containing Queen
Nefertiti’s preserved spleen as an ashtray. Someone is using George
Washington’s false teeth as a paperweight. Somewhere, a mouse is
nibbling at a frayed carton containing the lost gold of El Dorado. A
Yahoo! for junk would never break even: you simply couldn’t source
enough crack junque ninjas to infiltrate and catalog the world’s
storehouses of *tchotchkes*, white elephants and curios.And just as Napster found the cheapest way to get all the music
online, eBay has found the most cost-effective means of cataloging the
world’s attics and basements. It’s attic-Napster, and it’s spread the
cost and effort around. When you spy a nice casino ashtray on the
25-cent shelf at Thrift Town and snap its pic and put it up on eBay,
and when the renowned collector of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it
up to $400, you have taken part in a market transaction that has
simultaneously catalogued a nice bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a
collection where it will be lovingly cared for — and you’ve left a
record of where it is and what it was worth when last we saw it. Buried
in eBay’s backup tapes is a Blue Book with the last known value of
nearly every object we have ever created as a species, from Trinitite
(green, faintly radioactive glass fused at the detonation of the first
nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, $2.59 a gram at last check) to
commodity 40-gigabyte laptop hard-drives ($30 at press-time and falling
fast).