What is going on here?

eBay Item #141362932597

And this one as well.

eBay Item #171420678822

Sent this message to the seller
"Hi,

I have looked at your pictures, and am surprised to see a 1975 Hobbit with a dust jacket price of 20 shillings. The UK moved to a decimal currency 5 years before the date of this book (1970), my copy is priced at £3.00 in decimal currency. I don't think this is the correct dust jacket for the book, and you may want to mention this.

Trotter

To be fair, Trotter, would any seller who describes a book in one sentence, be likely to spot this kind of mis-match? Clearly the jacket is still a third edition jacket; just not a 1975 jacket. I'm guessing this is a c1966-1969 jacket; by 1970 the jackets had both imperial & metric, didn't they?... he asks the man with every impression of The Hobbit...

BH

Hi Stu,

I just wanted to make a couple of thing clears, this set was sold in July 2012 (and I thought it had been removed from Beren's site at that time) I think it was probably listed in 2011, so there is the reason for not saying it was the later printing box set, as they hadn't been released (I think) when I listed this set. Also I checked back on my listing, and it was described as Good only in the book and dustjacket condition box on the listing software. When it was uploaded to Berens site, it drops all the extra boxes, and only lists the description and title boxes, which I agree it should not have been listed as Near Fine, completely wrong. I guess I took it wrong in that it was two year old listing, and I thought it had been removed from Berens site. I assume since I have not listed any others of these sets since then, he left it up to at least show what the sets looked like (even with the damage). So my apologies

David

Khamûl wrote:
To be fair, Trotter, would any seller who describes a book in one sentence, be likely to spot this kind of mis-match? Clearly the jacket is still a third edition jacket; just not a 1975 jacket. I'm guessing this is a c1966-1969 jacket; by 1970 the jackets had both imperial & metric, didn't they?... he asks the man with every impression of The Hobbit...

BH

The dust jacket is from the 1966 Hobbit, the seller stated that they used the wrong photo.

The 1970 Hobbit has the price in £.s.d. and decimal currency.

25s. = £1.25p.

Wish I did have all the impressions of The Hobbit, have the most expensive one missing :(

Trotter wrote:

Khamûl wrote:
To be fair, Trotter, would any seller who describes a book in one sentence, be likely to spot this kind of mis-match? Clearly the jacket is still a third edition jacket; just not a 1975 jacket. I'm guessing this is a c1966-1969 jacket; by 1970 the jackets had both imperial & metric, didn't they?... he asks the man with every impression of The Hobbit...

BH

The dust jacket is from the 1966 Hobbit, the seller stated that they used the wrong photo.

The 1970 Hobbit has the price in £.s.d. and decimal currency.

25s. = £1.25p.

Wish I did have all the impressions of The Hobbit, have the most expensive one missing :(

So all the pictures that include the dustjacket (which are clearly the same jacket, due to the wear on the corners) are from a different book than the one being sold? Seems a bit fishy to me.

If you buy from this ebay seller, then check that the dust jacket is same one as in the pictures that they supply and is exactly the same as the description that they supplied.

eBay Item #301292509506

So I should pay £182.98 for a book published on 31/12/1961 (this book was first published in 1962 at least a day later) by HarperCollins (don't think they were around in 1962) and they state in the description

"Please note, the image is for illustrative purposes only, actual book cover, binding and edition may vary."

Your post, Trotter, pretty much sums up eBay today. If it gets any wose it'll be as bad as Abebooks...

BH

Khamûl wrote:
Your post, Trotter, pretty much sums up eBay today. If it gets any wose it'll be as bad as Abebooks...

BH

I actually think eBay is worse than AbeBooks these days. I have actually purchased a handful of books on Abe for less than they generally sell on eBay in the last couple of years. That said, both eBay and Abe are chocked full of resellers selling stock-photo books they don't actually have.

I haven't bought many books on eBay at all the last couple of years (but I have used it for other stuff, such as buying Brodart covers). As a place to buy relatively generic stuff that can't be picked up locally, it is OK. And that is because eBay has morphed from being a person-to-person site selling unwanted stuff people want to offload to being (mostly) a business to consumer site selling endless piles of generic Chinese crap (whilst taking a fat cut from the product, payments, logistics, etc). eBay deserves to be crushed under the weight of its own greed, frankly.

The sad thing is that there is really no prospect of ever getting a service again like eBay *used* to be, because it is impossible to be successful without a critical mass of buyers and sellers.