by Steve Weber
#105, 8 October 2007

New Tricks for Finding Scarce Books

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I'm always looking for ways to expand my bookselling business on Amazon.com, and within the past year I've dabbled in foreign-language books. After a rocky start, just recently I stumbled onto a new way of discovering which of these non-English books are in demand.
Every few weeks, when business is slow, I take a drive to an out-of-the-way bookstore where the prices on used copies are low, usually $1 to $3. Last winter, I realized that I had combed through every shelf in the store except for one - the foreign-language shelf

So, I took a deep breath and gambled on a few dozen foreign language books. I grabbed armfuls of fiction, nonfiction and children's books in Spanish, French, German and Italian. It was a crapshoot. I couldn't recognize most of the titles, and I based most of my buying decisions purely on the physical appearance of the book - whether it looked "expensive" or not.

What a fiasco. Nearly every book I'd picked was practically worthless; not one gem in the whole bunch.

And that was the last time I gave much thought to non-English books. But things changed last month, when I got a chatty e-mail from a bookseller in Germany. This bookseller just happened to mention the "Buyers Waiting" list on Amazon's German site.

Of course, I knew about the "Buyers Waiting" list on Amazon.com - where buyers specify the price they're willing to pay for an unlisted book. But a Buyer's Waiting list specifically for Amazon's German site? I had never suspected anything of the kind. I had always assumed that buyers from all over the world came to Amazon.com to place pre-orders for books they couldn't find.

But after a bit of poking around, I discovered that all of the major Amazon international sites - Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany - have their own Buyers Waiting lists, specific to those local Marketplaces.

For years, I had been downloading Amazon's U.S. Buyers Waiting list.

And on my own Web site, I summarize the most valuable outstanding orders here.

Now, I was amazed that I could download the Buyers Waiting lists for all those international sites using my same Pro-Merchant log-in and password. All I had to do was modify the URL to match each international site:

Canada - .ca

France - .fr

Germany - .de

United Kingdom - amazon.co.uk

So the complete URLs for the international Buyers Waiting lists are:

Canada
https://secure.amazon.ca/exec/panama/seller-admin/download/preorder-report/

France
https://secure.amazon.fr/exec/panama/seller-admin/download/preorder-report/

Germany
https://secure.amazon.de/exec/panama/seller-admin/download/preorder-report/

UK
https://secure.amazon.co.uk/exec/panama/seller-admin/download/preorder-report/

How can we use these lists? Well, just like the US lists, they're a great guide to which books are most in demand by mainstream online book buyers. And who knows? Perhaps you can find some arbitrage opportunities by finding titles that are wanted for a premium overseas but inexpensive in America.

A good portion of the pending orders on all these sites are for English books. (Is this because a high proportion of Amazon's customers are Americans living overseas, or are English books just this popular everywhere?) And while each international list has a decidedly different flavor, there are some basic similarities. Just as on the U.S. Buyers Waiting list, there's a smattering of "collectible" books wanted, but most of the big bucks involve niche nonfiction technical books.

Here's a rundown of the top 25 highest-priced Buyers Waiting titles on the UK, French, and German Marketplaces. Below the non-English titles you'll find a translation in parentheses.

United Kingdom

Such Things Are Known [Hardcover] by Burdick, Dorothy Price (UK pounds): 1300 1 buyer waiting Minimum acceptable condition: Acceptable