ScoutPal by Craig Stark #36, 14 February 2005

EDITOR'S NOTE: the following article is based in part on my own experiences with ScoutPal, in part on some valuable suggestions made during an interview with ScoutPal owner Dave Anderson and his wife Barbara. Barbara, by the way, was the original ScoutPal guinea pig - you can imagine the strange looks she got in the early days! - and has been using it successfully for over three years.

Like any other tool, ScoutPal is only as good as its user. If you know what you're doing, ScoutPal can be a powerful tool indeed for buying inventory; if not, much less so, but BookThink's New User Guide will bring you up to speed in no time.

First, what not to do. If you're new to bookselling, the worst thing you can do is go into a thrift shop or attend a sale and start checking every last book. At most venues, the odds of finding a saleable book are usually less than 1% or 2%. This means that, on average, you'd have to check 50 to 100 books, possibly more, to find a single title worth buying. Factor in the time it took to find that book, and you've already lost.

A better strategy is to use your instincts (such as they are at this point in time) to select books that appear to have value and check those and only those. You'll miss some winners at first, but you'll be much more efficient overall and find more and better inventory sooner. This approach also helps you to refine your buying instincts - to build a mental library of flashpoints. Whether you use ScoutPal or not, you'll always need good, knowledge-based instincts to succeed at bookselling. For more information on flashpoints, read this issue of the BookThinker

Important:

ScoutPal does NOT level the playing field for new and experienced booksellers. Its value is maximized in the hands of the user who has acquired a deep, extensive knowledge of books.

If you've come to ScoutPal, in other words, thinking that it's your instant ticket to bookselling success, forget it. There are no short cuts to success in any profession, and if anything, bookselling requires a longer apprenticeship than most.

If you're totally clueless about which books might have value, this article will give you some general guidelines.

Practice, practice, practice. Practice is necessary for learning how to use any tool, and ScoutPal is no exception. At first, I would definitely not recommend practicing in a store or at a sale, especially if you're an inexperienced bookseller. If you do, it's likely to be a frustrating experience, and what's more, you won't know how to take advantage of ScoutPal's full potential.

Fortunately, there is a great place to practice, and it's right at your computer. First open two more browser windows. Then you will have three windows open including this one.

In the second browser window, put in this URL - http://www.scoutpal.com/

Sign in with your user ID and password. This will take you to a page titled "Services for ScoutPal Users." Click the top box ("Format Your Results"), and you'll be taken you to a page titled "Format Editor."

In the third browser window, put in this URL - http://www.scoutpal.com/pda/

This page allows you to type in an ISBN and view results exactly as they will appear on your cell phone. You'll need to sign in here too.

Ok, you have three browser windows open. Go to the Format Editor and familiarize yourself with the options. Most of them are self-explanatory. The ones that aren't are explained in the notes at the bottom of the page.

Once you're satisfied that you understand everything, it's time to experiment. Get a stack of books, a dozen or so preferably newer titles (1950's to present), and, using the default format already in place, log in at the second browser window and type in an ISBN or LCCN from the first book in your stack. Go through the results line by line and try to make sense out of what's there. Most of it is pretty intuitive, but if something isn't clear, refer back to the Format Editor page for help. Go through the rest of the stack. This will show you how results differ from book to book and give you a better understanding of how to interpret them.

Next, go back to the Format Editor and start experimenting. Change one or more items, add something - whatever - and plug in the same ISBN's and observe how this affects the results. A half hour or so spent doing this, and you should be able to come up with a format that will work best for you. As you gain experience with ScoutPal, you may discover that some formats work better in one venue, some in another. Up to 9 different formats can be saved, all of which can then be changed on the fly simply by entering the format number plus 200 (e.g. 201-209) in the search box and "Fetch."

When making buying decisions in the field, it's clearly best to have as much information as possible about the books you're looking at. For this reason, one of your format choices should include everything that's available: Amazon Marketplace prices, counts and sales rankings for new, used and collectible copies; buyers waiting; Abebooks prices and counts; PriceGrabber prices and counts; information about all editions; and the price graph. If time is of the essence (and it often is at FOL and estate sales), you can eliminate some of this information - say, confine your searches to Amazon Marketplace and opt out of a few other features - and retrieve abbreviated results more quickly, but keep in mind that the resulting information may be misleading.

Here's why: there was a time when you could research ISBN titles at Amazon Marketplace and be reasonably certain that the prices found were a benchmark for the Internet - that is, if your book was listed in Marketplace for $10, chances are that was the best price anywhere. Or close to it. Well, if you haven't noticed, those days are gone. If you're a regular user of FetchBook's search service, which retrieves and ranks the lowest prices from dozens of different venues, you're aware that Amazon Marketplace listings are often not the first to appear on the results list, and sometimes they're not even on the first page. There are many more competing venues now, some with unusually competitive prices. This is why using ScoutPal's PriceGrabber option is so important. PriceGrabber's results aren't as comprehensive as FetchBook's, but they include a number of important players, among them eBay and Alibris.

Using the Abebooks option is also important. Two reasons: it delivers still more comparables and, more importantly, allows you to enter LCCN's for books that pre-date the ISBN era. This brings into play huge numbers of books published in the 1950's and 1960's that were previously not searchable with ScoutPal.

Example. Suppose you're at a thrift shop. You type in the ISBN for a book that looks promising, and this price comes up: $128.33. It's also the only copy. You're thrilled, right? Not so fast. This price should be a red flag. If you or me had listed this book (assuming it really was worth this much), we most likely would've priced it at $130 or $129.99 - or something that made, well, more sense. The fact that this is an unorthodox price should suggest to you that this is a drop shipper - a seller who doesn't have the book in inventory but, if a sale is made, will purchase it from another seller and have it shipped to you. Drop shippers often (automatically, via software) compute their asking prices as a fixed percentage above lower priced books available, and the somewhat puzzling and obscenely high outcome reflects this. If you investigate their feedback, it often contains numerous complaints about books not being available. Also, drop-shippers congregate at Amazon Marketplace because canceling sales isn't as punitive as it is on other venues. Having access to Abebooks and PriceGrabber prices, therefore, can be very important.

Another example. Suppose you're at that same thrift shop, type in another ISBN, and this price comes up: $4.95. This time there are four copies. You're distinctly un-thrilled, right? Again, not so fast. If there had been 100 copies, chances are good that this price would have indicated a book with little or no resale value, but the fact that there are only three other copies means that it's time to check the price graph. The price graph, which is actually a series of numbers, shows you this: 1779. What does this mean? Each number in this string represents a price rounded up to the nearest $10. Therefore, there is one copy under $10, two copies priced between $60 and $70, and one copy priced between $80 and $90. This should get your attention. It's time to find out why there's an anomalous copy at $4.95. To do this, you'll need to click the price and look at the description. If it turns out that this is an ex-library copy with a detached front board, extensive highlighting, and a pronounced cigarette odor, there's a good chance that the book you're holding (assuming it's in good condition) is a winner.

Counts and sales rankings can also be important. If a book has relatively few copies available and a sales ranking under 10,000, more than likely this will result in a quick sale for you. On the other hand, if there are many copies available and the ranking is well over 100,000, your prospects aren't nearly as good. A high number, however, isn't necessarily a bad thing, even much, much higher than 100,000. In the case of an uncommon book, it can mean that the sales ranking isn't good simply because so few copies surface in the market. It's also possible, of course, for a book to be uncommon and in low demand, but if your instincts aren't sending you a clear message and the price is right, it's usually a good idea to take a chance on an uncommon book anyway.

If there's a lesson here, it's that ScoutPal can't do everything for you. It won't flash "Buy!" on your cell phone. (Wouldn't that be a programming feat!) But, if you'll take advantage of all of its features, it will almost invariably deliver the information you need to make an intelligent buying decision.