Used Paperbacks

A couple of weeks ago I was in downtown Portland on some business or other. When I was done I still had some time so I looked around to see if there was anything interesting to do. I spied a bookshop (Cameron's) across the street so I went in. It is an old, funky place, full of old magazines and old paperbacks. I found four paperbacks in short order, all by authors I know and like, so I bought them all for $10:

• "Generation Warriors" by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Moon
• "The Ecolitan Enigma" by L.E.Modesitt, Jr.
• "The Merchants War" by Frederik Pohl
• "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. LeGuin

It turns out the first two books are part of a series, but they are not the first volumes in their series. Well, maybe I ought to start with the first books in the series, so I look them up on Amazon.com and I find the books. The price is one cent. Shipping is four dollars. So two books are eight bucks. Incredible. How can someone make any money doing this? Obviously, they must be making some money on the shipping, but it can't be much. You need an envelope, an address label and postage, not to mention someone to pull the book from inventory and put the package together. Even if you mail it at book rate it still must cost a couple of bucks to get the book in the mail. They must be doing a heck of a volume business for this to be worthwhile. And it wasn't just one store and one book, there are a bunch of places doing this. Shoot, I can't afford to drive downtown and park, much less buy anything, for $8. The Internet is a wondrous thing.