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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (197539)	3/21/2023 4:21:38 PM
From: sense	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218339

I read all the Sci-Fi I was forced to as part of schooling in the 1970's... Bradbury, etc., but, mostly don't care much for that genre in fiction... But, I do read... a bit of everything... liked Dune... also don't like fantasy genre much... but, like Lord of the Rings... Harry Potter is a great read, etc. Read Rothfuss recently, and liked it enough to chase down and read the others... well enough written to be in the class of "don't want to put it down" reads. I think "really good" tends to overcome genre limits... and, sometimes, you just need "something completely different" as a vacation from "more of the same old"... That universe in my interest only expanded with the invention of the internet... and Amazon coming along and absolutely crushing the rare book market. Know I've mentioned it before that I recognized that as "a market crash"... and spent a couple of years acquiring rare books "on sale" as the market cratered. And, from that, read a lot outside prior interest... but, also, learned a tremendous amount about books and the market for them... As part of that... useful to determine what it is that makes a book valued... not just now, but, worth owning as core assets and as family heirloom... (Which, I would say, don't do... unless the kids understand, "get it" and have interest / awareness... as, a lot of what I found of most value for least money was stuff kids got and sold "garage sale" style on E-Bay without knowing its value... a few perhaps even kids cherry picking Dad's library on the sly for beer money... list a $1500 book for $50 on an Ebay sale... mine now. Lots of work, at first, just to figure out what things are or might be worth... and why... given this copy of the "same thing" seems it is worthless, while that one is... $$$$. That's not "work" though... if you're actually immersing yourself in what you love... and learning more about it. In Sci-fi... looked at quality copies of "top names"... still find Jules Verne appealing in the overlap in period with Victorian bindings... many of which I have collected as "objets d'art" as much as literature... The market also has "flash in the pan" issues... Life of Pi... seemed very collectible... but, mills need grist for grinding... Dickens maybe not as popular if he'd stopped after his first success... versus putting out twenty ? Many of the most popular authors of the 1890's to the 1920's churned out huge volumes... as "popular" authors do today... and, today... they're not worth much. But, I read a lot of them, and find the quality often as good or better than modern "high volume" novelists manage... Will Stephen King or Danielle Steele "last" ? I'm not betting on it. There are plenty of "standards" in classic literature worthy of collecting... one of the more compelling, I thought, was Mark Twain... a proven survivor... so, bought a bit of that as the market cratered... Stunned, just now, as went to look... At the bottom of the market... could get a quality copy of "Jumping Frog" for under $1000... currently $25K to $35K... I see things that I'd have valued at $50 to $100 or $200 when I was buying... now at $1000 to $1500 or more. I don't expect they'll fully retrace that move... as Amazon already did what they did, and there's no obvious new path to a sudden expansion in previously constrained supply... as "selling on the internet" enabled. Lots of people "threw in the towel" as expecting "the internet" would kill interest in ownership of physical books... but, what I saw occurring... was accelerating growth in publishing paired with growth in digital... while "collectible" is such a small portion of the total market that print on demand and digital copies in the public domain... amount to "growing the market" along with free advertising. All of which is topical here, now... only as... that's usually the last shoe that drops in market declines... "collectibles" tend to do well as "real assets" approaching, during and throughout declines... only until... after the crash bottoms, and clocks tick for a while... reality catches up, if slowly, particularly with those nouveaux riche fueled by fast use made of easy money... and suddenly, famous paintings decline in value as "dumped" to pay the bills... and huge mansions go "on sale" and "unsold" without massive discounts over the prices paid being applied... only as and after the market bottoms. Banks wallowing... is not typically "the end point" of a crisis... and this round, if unlikely to be typical in scale, not likely to deviate far from script ? So, applying same concept as I do in stocks, or auctions... time to start sorting out "what's worth owning"... well prior to the start of the event of the sale...