Amazon's $23,698,655.93 Book About Flies (SCREENSHOT)

You can't put a price on a good education, but $23 million for a textbook still seems a bit steep.

Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger, recently spotted the outrageous price tag on Peter Lawrence’s "The Making of a Fly," listed by Amazon at $23,698,655.93, plus -- and here's the deal breaker -- shipping.

Lawrence's book does boast mostly 5-star reviews, but any developmental biology textbook pushing eight figures should be a tough sell.

Something seemed off.

In a blog post, Eisen describes, in great detail, the robotic price war he witnessed play out over the course of 10 days. The two competing book sellers -- profnath and borderbook -- were, according to Eisen, "clearly using automatic pricing – employing algorithms that didn’t have a built-in sanity check on the prices they produced."

Eisen found that profnath would adjust its price to exactly 0.9983 the borderbook offering, only to have borderbook respond accordingly by returning its deal to 1.270589 times that of profnath, in turn causing the two price tags to skyrocket.

Eventually, someone must have tipped off the sellers, as the price reportedly decreased to around $100.

For at least one sarcastic buyer, scoring a copy for $20 million felt like a big score.

"I was fortunate enough to buy this at the bargain price of $19,087,354," the customer commented. "There must have been a sale because the next day it was listed at $23M."

SCREENSHOT:

Comments

[Ricardo Valentin]

03:31 PM on 04/27/2011

Ah the computers! It would have taken 200 booksellers a whole year of non stop work to achieve this level of disengagement from reality.

[Soulfest]

09:13 AM on 04/27/2011

I did not realize book selling entailed so much drama and intrigue.

[Mausinn]

09:41 PM on 04/26/2011

That was for the paperback, can you imagine the price of the hardbound first edition?

[scoobanchi]

03:37 PM on 04/26/2011

Check your math.

[Demidan]

03:22 PM on 04/26/2011

Now if the book had a personal inscription...

[hairydodger]

02:59 PM on 04/26/2011

Computer trading works much the same. I put a bid in to buy a stock around two dollars a share but there was a 'flash crash' and for a moment it was twelve cents. I auto bought two hundred shares at twelve cents. Two things were the result of this for me. First, I was sorry I didn't have an order in for twenty thousand shares. Secondly I took all my meager funds out of the market forever. I realized I could have been on the sellers side of that computer train wreck.

[Joel Redman]

05:48 PM on 04/26/2011

This is almost exactly what caused the crash in 2007. Computers were buying low then selling high, to each other, then someone put an enormous amount of stock up for sale (I'm looking at you Goldman), causing the computerized hedge funds to go crazy selling them because the computers figured something was up.

[garder54]

12:24 PM on 04/26/2011

Wouldn't one price decrease and the other increase? I'm confused.

[MISTERUNCONVENTIONAL]

12:28 PM on 04/26/2011

*face palm*

[Madbunny]

12:53 PM on 04/27/2011

No. Here is how it works.

Seller A has a great reputation, and gets customers. They can charge a buck more or whatnot and are still likely to get customers because they have the reputation. The thing is, they don't actually have that book in inventory, so they base their price off wherever they get the book from. In this case Seller B.

Seller B bases *their* prices on the current market value of the book.

A sees that the price of the book from Seller B has gone up, and automatically raises it's rate by a small amount to keep within the profit margin.

B sees that the market price of the book has gone up and raises it's price to match.

A sees that the price of the book has gone up and automatically raises it's rate by a small amount to maintain a profit margin.

And so on. Since it's computers, they do this all automatically, and there was no real 'sanity' check that triggered a human review. Its an interesting thing, I find myself wondering how often this happens.

[AEAH]

12:23 PM on 04/26/2011

Those computer glitches bring silly stuff to life. Look for example at the Global Warming World Record 266ºF temperature in Hattiesburg, MS on April 15!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLtnVsDNakI

[SeanCamoni]

12:09 PM on 04/26/2011

$19,087,354 is nearly $20 million, not 20 grand.