Quite right, my apologies! Thanks for taking this to Outworld. For a further update (I need to get this off my chest
), people might be interested to know that the reseller in question bought one copy of this audio CD, new, for £5.08 on 6 December ... and two weeks later are trying to charge over £200 for it.
To be honest, I don't think this is a deliberate attempt to screw people. Nobody will actually be stupid enough – I hope – to pay over £200 for an audio CD. This is the result of a) Amazon refusing to acknowledge that the item is available to retailers, in combination with b) somebody's – either Amazon's, or the reseller's or a third party's – demand-led pricing software going nuts.
Basically, Amazon is not reliable when it comes to questions of the availability of products. Amazon like people to think that they sell everything: in truth, they don't want to, as it's hugely difficult to make money that way. In books, for instance, they like you to think you can get anything from them; in reality, they'd much rather you just bought copies of what they've already bought in, in giant quantities.
If, for example, you order a copy of
An Obscure Novel from Minuscule Press, Amazon have to order that in specially, probably from a wholesaler, and will only get something like 30% discount tops on a single-copy order (Minuscule Press will have already given around 50% to the wholesaler). After a few days, one copy of
An Obscure Novel arrives in Amazon's warehouse. Some Amazon drudge will have to unpack it, scan it, and shelve it somewhere. Then some other peon will have to pick up the despatch note, wander through the warehouse looking for the single copy of
An Obscure Novel, find it, pack it and send it out again. By this time, even at low low wages, this is costing Amazon money, especially if the customer has chosen free postage.
If, however, you want a copy of
Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code, Amazon has already ordered several tons of this from Behemoth Books; they're stacked up half a mile high in the warehouse behind a long table manned by an endless row of shackled serfs. Amazon probably got 70% discount or more from Behemoth, because of the size of the order, and each book takes less than 30 seconds to pack and process, so even though Amazon are giving their customers great lumpen discounts they are still making money – just – on each transaction. Because they're making millions of transactions, they come out in the black.
So Amazon has a variety of ways of discouraging its customers from buying odd titles from small presses, up to and including pretending that the book is unavailable through normal retail channels. I'm not saying this is true in every case! Your colleague's book, DH, might well be genuinely out of print. Even there, though, you need to shop around. There are various sneaky things going on in Amazon's marketplace pricing systems, from software that undercuts the lowest price by a penny to demand-led pricing software that sets prices on a runaway train.
