I could put this in a more general topic, but I wanted to do this because of ‘Nightshade’ specifically, so I am putting this in Books.
I recently bought ‘Nightshade’ off of Amazon and just now realized how lucky I was. I got it for 7£, but it is now being sold for 337£ ?!?
Sure Ebay is cheaper, but (for where I am) there is only two listings.
How would I know when/where to get these things like books and such? And what a reasonable price would be.
And why do some people think they can sell this stuff for 300£? (Last question is kind of rhetorical, I know that some people are just bad people)
There are certainly some older books, mostly later, rarer Virgin books like So Vile A Sin, The Dying Days, Cold Fusion and, famously, Lungbarrow that regularly sell for hundreds of pounds on eBay. Those books are very hard to find physical copies of, although there are a few ebooks knocking around, like on the BBC’s old website.
But £300 for Nightshade is, indeed, absolute nonsense! There’s no chance of that being anything but a scam.
Ultimately, it depends on which book. I’d say £7 is pretty good for Nightshade. You could definitely get more early VNAs, EDAs, or PDAs for similar or cheaper if you stuck around on eBay for a bit keeping an eye out. Later books, and really popular ones like The Also People, for example, will go for a bit more, but you can get some really good bargains just by sticking a few alerts on your phone (which is what I do, as I almost exclusively buy from eBay as well as vintage/secondhand bookshops. I got most of my Who collection for around £5-7. Just last week I found The Death of Art for £4.99, and that’s classically pretty dear!)
Also, I think the average price for a Who book on the internet has gone up in the last few years. Maybe it’s become more popular to try to collect the old stories? When I was first getting into the EDAs I got loads of books for really cheap that seem to be going for more nowadays– Alien Bodies, for instance. These things go in waves.
I’d also say– never pay anything if you find the price uncomfortable!
It’s atleast good to know that having an eye on Ebay seems to be the way to go. I was half worried there was some well known way that I well… don’t know of.
But I guess collecting these things comes with time and picking stuff up one by one when the price seems nice.
But what would then be a good price for something like ‘lungbarrow’?
Yeah there’s a running joke in the fandom, at least on tumblr, about how obscenely expensive copies of lungbarrow are. I guess the combination of limited number printed + cult status means that they’re considered incredibly valuable but also the pricing can absolutely get out of hand
Lungbarrow is commonly priced in the 200 to 400 quid range, in my experience, but it’s the outlier, with the exception of The Book of the War, which usually goes for 200 to 300 quid. There are about ten other books that you’d be lucky to see under 40, 50 pounds, but those are usually sold for about that much. Oh, So Vile a Sin also tends to be about 150 bob, there may be one or two others I’ve neglected. There’s a selection that are rarely found under twenty, but most of the rest regularly go for c. 10 bob.
I recently downsized my NA collection but kept some of the rarer ones - Lungbarrow, So Vile a Sin etc. I kept them partly because I actually would to read them at some point but also because the I was thinking that I could make a little bit of cash from selling them at some point in the future.
I’m not sure if I could justify to myself selling Lungbarrow for hundreds of pounds though. That just seems extortionate to me. I think, if I were to sell them, then I would just put them up for auction on eBay and let others fight it out amongst themselves. Anything over the £4.99 I originally paid for them would be a profit in my eyes.
You know, being a ‘Doctor Who’ fan is fun and all, but I hate being someone who values and absolutely loves physical media.
We are not only slowly losing the fight, but we are also just paying so much money (that I don’t even have)
Because anyone can list on Amazon, it’s just someone chancing their arm. They don’t actually want to sell the book, but they’d part with it if someone offered way over the odds.
It’s the same on Vinted, which is full of items that never budge because the seller is waiting for someone to buy their dress or handbag at a “dream price”.
Back in the early 10s I got a CD (not DW-related) that usually went for over $40 for like $1.50 because there were two sellers on Amazon whose algorithms were both programmed to undercut the lowest seller by $.01, so they kept chasing each other down cent by cent… result.
I love having physical books and CDs, but damn are they expensive!!!