foaddoc wrote:

And the same advice is given to tyro horseplayers. It's ********.
In the first place, if you don't have a minimum amount of disposable
income, you shouldn't undertake the activity. In the second place,
no matter how meticulous you are with your fantasy investments, real
money in real time creates different pressures that people react to
differently. Third, winning and losing have their own psychologies,
to which people react differently. Paper trading doesn't teach that.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not thinking of it so much as a form
of gambling as a body of knowledge. Getting some sense of what makes a
valuable book valuable and finding out how the whole market works seems
to me a reasonable way to begin.

Fourth, much book knowledge is tactile: you learn with your hands.
For my money the guy'd be much better off going to a library sale and
buying $20 worth of books that he thinks collectible and bringing them
home and examining the jackets and the binding and the number lines
and all the rest of it, and then seeing if his intuition as to
value was correct. Not to mention he'd have something to read.

Yes, that's a good suggestion. I don't know that it has to be either/or,
though. He could learn a lot from doing both.

Finally, the guy's never going to know if he enjoys collecting books
without collecting them.

I guess one does tend to think in terms of one's own position, so I'm
assuming he owns and reads books (it would be a bit odd if he didn't).
What I suppose he doesn't do, or hasn't done until now, is buy books
with a view to their collectible value.

I may be wrong, but I think he might stand a better chance of enjoying
buying collectible books if he knew just a tad about it before pouring a
lot of money into what may be a costly mistake.

It may be that JYW is enamored of Ebay because of the peculiarities of
his situation: collecting arcane subjects written in English while
living in Asia.

Again, yes, my own position may make a difference, and I guess a
well-rounded set of tips should include advice to browse regular
bricks-and-mortar bookshops. But I was just throwing in my five cents,
not writing a comprehensive introduction to book-collecting. If other
people (such as your good self) throw in their own five cents' worth
it'll all make a muckle that the OP can pick and choose from as he pleases.

Personally I rarely use ebay, except when searching for gems such as
my recently acquired Mary Ann's Gilligan's Island Cookbook inscribed
by Dawn Wells, Tina Louise, and Bob Denver. Much of the joy of the
actviity, or my joy anyway, comes from browsing through the stacks.

I go through phases on that front. There have been times when I've come
home loaded with books from book fairs and bricks-and-mortar stores, and
other times when all I've got from a day's slogging around concrete
streets is sore feet. Conversely, I've gone through patches of total
disillusionment with eBay, getting cramped shoulders from sitting in
front of a computer monitor and despairing of ever finding anything
worth having.

I do not discount the interweb, but to confine yourself to it,
especially as a neophye, is silly.

Yes, I can go along with that, but it's still a good way of finding out
about books and how the book market works.

John