The Collectible Book Blog

By S. P. Wurth

I don’t know about you, but I have more important things to do than to wait for each rare book that I am interested in to close on eBay.  Don’t get me wrong – I love collectible books and buy thousands of them every year.  Many are purchased on eBay.  Most days we bid on a dozen books or more, winning many of them.  How can a book collector do this efficiently without spending hours staring at their computer screen?

We use an automated bidding program, and I encourage you to do the same.  This process is known as sniping, a term taken from the military sniper who waits in hiding and picks off the enemy with one accurate shot.  Automated bidding programs are directed and loaded by you, and they are one of the best tools the modern book lover can add to their repertoire of eBay tools.

I know that some folks have a negative view of sniping.  Believe me, only those who choose not to use such a system feel that way.

Here are the advantages:

1.      You don’t have to hang around your computer to bid.  If you use a web-based sniper, your computer doesn’t even have to be on!

2.      You can escape “auction fever.”  Just set your snipe to the highest level that you are willing to pay for a book, and forget it.

3.      You aren’t concerned with who is bidding and who is not bidding.  Before eBay scrambled bidder id’s it was easy to tell who you were bidding against.  Sometimes, if one were not sniping, you could have a conflict if it was a friend or a customer.  But with a sniping program, if you set it up hours or days before the actual bid is placed, you are not concerned with possible competition problems.  (By the way, there is still a way to tell who the scrambled bidder is: feedback ratings change slowly and are not scrambled.)

4.      By using a good program, your bid will be automatically placed for you within the last few seconds.  The program places the bid – you don’t have to worry about manually getting that last-second bid in there.  If you try manually, all sorts of things can throw you off and if you wait until there are 6 seconds to go in the auction and then try to place your bid, it might not get through.  Most sniping programs are calibrated to eBay’s site clock and will place your bid at the last second, or whenever your program settings dictate.  As I watch some of my better auctions close, the last bid is generally placed 3-7 seconds from closing.  I wouldn’t want to try that manually.

I am using Auction Sentry Deluxe for my sniping program at present.  I really like it!  They offer a free trial for 10 days, and you should know if it works for you within that time.  Their current rate for purchasing the program is $13 for a one-year license.  I am not making anything on the recommendation, and I do think that it is a great program.  Unfortunately, it is only offered for machines running Windows. 

 I used to run isnipeit, available at www.isnipeit.com, which also worked well.

There have been times when I used a web-based program.  I think that particular service is now defunct, but there are a lot of programs available.

A great site for reviewing software for eBay is The Auction Software Review.  Here is the link to their sniping review page, with 24 web-based and 17 desktop applications for you to sort through.  The reviews from this site I have found to be reliable.

So, are you serious about building a rare book collection?  Get sniping!

This is the second in a series of articles on Buying Collectible Books on eBay.