I collect old, obscure and rare books. I've programmed my wants into Ebay - along with ABE and Biblio - but increasingly it seems like time wasted.
99.5% of matches that Ebay send me are NOT for the old antiquarian books I'm looking for but Print On Demand copies - or worse, photocopied articles - which sellers list under "Antiquarian".
Ebay used to be a good place to buy second hand books but now it has morphed into an Amazon style platform where businesses that don't actually stock books dominate the marketplace. They list thousands of old titles they have scans of and hawk those as "antiquarian" books.
Plus it is obvious they have not acquired the copyright to do so in many cases. They're just listing everything they can scan and presumably only responding to copyright claims if and when they arise.
From a collecting perspective it is a nightmare wading through circa 20 wants match emails every day with 99.5% of the books only ever being Print On Demand copies.
Grr!
