I’m a book fetishist. I can’t help it - I want to read the latest hardback releases as soon as they come out. I used to drool over these releases, but I’ve discovered a very nifty way to keep tabs on the latest books at a very cheap price - and sometimes turn a small profit.

What I do is if I know a book is coming out in hardcover that I want to read, I buy it on the day of release at my bookseller of choice. I take it home and without hesitation immediately start reading it, putting aside anything else that I happen to be reading at the moment. Given my reading habits, I can usually knock that book off in about two or three days.

As soon as I’m done with it, I immediately eBay the book. This is where things get odd - given my discounts at my local bookstore, I can usually nearly break even by doing this, and I often turn a small profit. Not enough of a regular profit to become an online book reseller by any means, but

Here’s an example. Recently, Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon was released in hardback. My price for the book is about $19.60, or about $21 after sales tax. It’s about a three day read for me, so it would appear on eBay on November 24 and thus sell on December 1. Take a peek at what the book is currently selling for on eBay - in other words, about a $2-$3 profit for me, plus I had the opportunity to be the first on my block to read Pynchon’s latest.

I always use my “weird” eBay techniques and I follow reasonable best practices when I sell, so it usually goes quite well. Plus, most bidders seem not to notice that the item isn’t new because it is such a recent release; the used copy always bids up to the same realm as the new ones.

Please note that this technique isn’t a sure thing. It merely ensures that you’ll get a strong return on your investment in the book, minus the depreciation for reading it.

This is a great technique to use if you’re a book addict like I am. I’m able to keep up with the latest books, read them completely at my leisure, and avoid the often-long waits for new releases at my local library. Even better: I occasionally turn a little profit.

When I was spending money like it was water, I was buying about ten CDs and DVDs a week. I was a media addict, buying all kinds of music and movies without knowing much about them at all - following off-the-cuff recommendations and “trendy” sites like Pitchfork Media.

While I did discover a lot of things that are very dear to my heart now (for example, the greatest album ever recorded), most of the stuff I bought turned out to be utter rubbish that I really didn’t like all that much, with varying degrees of like and dislike among them.

Eventually, I reached financial meltdown and I found myself staring at a mountain of CDs and DVDs that were basically signs of my frivolous spending, but as I went through them, I had a difficult time deciding which ones to sell and which ones to keep. So I developed a plan that has worked amazingly well for me, and it might help you to figure things out, too.

First, I divided my collection into two, with one “collection” starting out completely empty. I did this with both my DVD and CD collection, of course.

Then, for the next six months whenever I watched a DVD or listened to a CD, I put that one into the formerly empty collection. It became clear after a while that the “new” collection was full of things that I actually enjoyed, and the ones left behind were the ones that I didn’t enjoy.

When the six month mark came up, I went through the remaining DVDs and CDs, saved just a few of them, and sold the rest. There were a few items that I didn’t want to part with for sentimental and child-related reasons, and there were more than a few that my wife refused to get rid of, but when the first purge occurred, I sold off more than half of my DVD collection and a good-sized portion of my music collection.

Then, I started over. This enables me to filter out anything new that I’ve purchased that is really unnecessary, as well as find any borderline rubbish that I watched a time or two but really have no interest in seeing or listening to anymore.

This technique made it easy for me to determine which portion of my music and video collection that I could liquidate without a change to my lifestyle and by investing the proceeds, I took assets that were just sitting there and slowly losing value and turned them into an asset that just sits there and gains in value. Not to mention the storage space that I freed up.

Now that the Christmas shopping season is upon us, many of us are wondering what on earth we should get for people in our family. “What do I buy for my ultra-trendy teenage niece?” you might be wondering, or “How can I get something that will wow Uncle Ron without breaking the bank?”

Interestingly enough, this is an area where blogs shine for usefulness, because you can easily get a lead on some really interesting gift ideas that will leave your niece thinking that you’re a bit less of a loser than everyone else in the entire universe and, at the same time, put a big toothy grin on ol’ Uncle Ron’s face.

Here’s the exact process I used this year to find some smashing gifts for several picky family members using nothing more than blogs, a few price comparison sites, and a bit of time. To show you how it works, I’m going to walk through the procedure using three test cases:

Grandmother is an old-fashioned woman who believes that a woman’s place is in the kitchen serving her family - and that’s where you’ll often find her. If you ask her what she wants, she sighs and says, “Oh, nothing.” If you press her, she’ll look around the room and name something completely off the top of her head.

Uncle Ron is a retired farmer who sold his farm years ago and now lives in a beautiful house in the city. His tastes are upscale, but he has a bit of an old fashioned nature to him. He’s got a quick wit, is a bit sarcastic, and usually sees the utility in things. He almost always holds court at family events at the card table, talking politics and sipping on a drink of some sort. In other words, your favorite uncle.

Katie is a fifteen year old strong-willed young woman who is so firmly entrenched in Generation Z that you can scarcely make heads or tails out of her. She’s always listening to her iPod and seems to have a general disdain for the entire world. She’s your only niece, but she makes about as much sense to you as Fidel Castro riding down Wall Street on the back of a hippopotamus.

So, let’s begin.

Find out what their favorite things are.
Don’t worry at this stage about what they might want, just make a list of a few of their favorite things. Give a call to someone living with them if you have no idea, or maybe pay them a visit and see how they spend their time or what they show you that is interesting to them. Don’t ask for gift ideas, because you’ll make the experience of opening the gift much less of a surprise.

Grandmother spends all of her time in the kitchen, so you think that something convenient for her kitchen might enable her to sit down a bit more with the family. You stop by to pay her a visit and you see her mixing some cookie dough up with a fork. Of course, you eat a couple a half dozen a dozen of the cookies before you leave. A new cookbook might be okay, but something that can mix that cookie dough faster might be even better, so you don’t have to spend all of your time talking to her back while she’s busy at the counter. The spending cap on Grandmother is quite high; if you find a very expensive item, there are always plenty of others that are willing to go together with you to buy it.

Uncle Ron is rarely seen without a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label; he even brings a bottle to family events and tries to get everyone to drink a glass with him. Thankfully, he can hold his liquor well, except one should avoid talking politics with him in the late evening; last Christmas, he referred to your brother-in-law as a “rotten liberal hippie” and threatened to beat him to death with a golf club for stating that everyone in America should get top quality health care for free. You decide on something golf or scotch related for him. Uncle Ron is especially close to you and gives stellar gifts, so I often spend as much as $60 on his Christmas gift.

Katie basically doesn’t speak to anyone. You give your sister a call to see what’s going on with her and all you hear is that Katie spends all of her time listening to old ’70’s records in her room and playing her acoustic guitar. On the good side, she’s apparently paying much more attention to her appearance; on the bad side, she’s dressing like Woody Guthrie. You decide that a couple CDs of good modern folk-type music would be a good gift for her, as your spending limit is $20 for her.

Specifically search blogs for these topics.
You head over to Technorati and Icerocket to try to find some potential gift ideas. At this time of the year, people are beginning to post “best of” lists, so the goal is to find a few of those and compare them. The primary goal is to find many independent references to the quality of a particular item with the goal of figuring out the type of item and the make of the item. Another advantage of blog searching is that bloggers often make organic connections that comparison sites won’t necessarily make, plus a perfunctory look at a blog can quickly tell you whether or not it is written by a company, whereas product reviews are often impossible to truly read.
Grandmother’s idea seemed clearest, so you search for “best mixer” dough at Technorati (to avoid music mixing devices) and find two distinct references on cooking blogs to KitchenAid making the best mixers, so you narrow her gift down to a KitchenAid mixer. Searching simply for KitchenAid confirms this. So, you’ve decided that this year, you’re going to get Grandmother a KitchenAid mixer that will tear through pretty much anything she might ever want to mix in the kitchen.

Uncle Ron would probably appreciate a good bottle of scotch, so you search for “best scotch” to see what you find. After reading a number of posts about different people’s concepts of best scotch, you find several references to Caol Ila as a great tasting and moderately expensive scotch. Following their recommendation, you decide to get Uncle Ron a bottle of Caol Ila scotch for Christmas.

Katie is apparently heavily into folk music, but you get a general sense that she might not be impressed with your collection of Peter, Paul, and Mary records, so you search Technorati for “best folk” 2006 and “best folk” 2005 to find some of the best new folk music releases. The names Laura Cantrell and Devendra Banhart come up over and over again as you read through the listings, so you decide to look for CDs by both of them.

Use product review sites to narrow this down to specific items.
Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re buying for each person, use some product comparison sites to narrow it down to a specific item. I find that the old standby, amazon.com, works very well for most items. though many people swear by sites such as bizrate. At this stage, we’re mostly just concerned with finding the exact item for each person; later, we’ll worry about the best price for that item.

Grandmother deserves a high-end KitchenAid mixer for her kitchen. After reading tons of reviews of different KitchenAid mixers, you decide on the KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer for Grandmother this Christmas, even though the first price you saw makes you quickly dial some other relatives and ask them to go in on it with you. It’s a gift that suits her passion; making wonderful soul food for the whole family.

Uncle Ron is getting some good Caol Ila scotch for Christmas. After reviewing several sites on scotch (like scotchwhisky.net) and looking for a variety of recommendations, you choose to get him a 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch, which will apparently fit within your price range and won the gold medal at the San Francisco Spirits competition. Sounds tasty; maybe Uncle Ron will pop open the bottle over a game of bridge and give everyone a taste.

Katie will be receiving a CD or two by Devendra Banhart and Laura Cantrell. You found several stunning reviews of Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow, so these are your top two choices for her. If they’re relatively cheap, they might both fall within your budget. You’re kind of concerned that she may already have them, but if they’re good, she will appreciate the thought and be able to trade them for others.

Use price comparison sites to find the best price.
Now that you have very specific items in mind to buy people, it’s time to use price comparison sites to find the absolute best deal you can. I recommend using Froogle for this purpose, as it is very good at narrowing things down quickly.

Grandmother’s KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer costs $329.99 at the local kitchen supply store, but can be had from iKitchen for $239.99, according to Froogle’s results. You could find even lower prices, but iKitchen seems to have a solid reputation as a seller of kitchen implements. Just that quickly, you’ve saved at least $90 on an amazing gift for Grandmother - and softened the blow on the wallets of a few grandchildren, too.

Uncle Ron’s 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch can be had from the local liquor store at $74.99, but can be obtained from Premium Home and Garden for $44.99 according to Froogle, a savings of $30. Many other retailers also offer it below the $50 mark, so a bit of research into shipping might uncover a better deal. Ol’ Uncle Ron will be goofy again this Christmas, it seems.

Katie’s CDs are also cheaper than the local music shops. Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow can both be had new in the shrink wrap for about $20 total (after shipping) on eBay, as discovered by Froogle. A few bids now will mean that your Christmas gift for Katie will be ready well in advance of the big day.

In short, careful use of different avenues of research on the internet, when combined, can isolate stellar gifts for family and friends while also finding stellar prices. In short, follow these four steps to excavate great gifts this Christmas:
1. Figure out what they like (but don’t ask directly what they want) by calling or visiting them
2. Determine a great idea for them by using blogs and blog search engines like Technorati.
3. Break it down to the exact item via product comparison sites, such as amazon.com.
4. Get a great deal on the item using comparison shopping sites like Froogle.

Over several years as a regular but non-professional eBay seller and buyer, I’ve been accumulating a set of “best practices” for online auctioneering as a seller. eBay has regularly published such lists, but these lists are often skewed towards choosing “best” practices for maximizing your profits only when they overlap with eBay’s utility and profits. As for me, eBay and other online auction sites are a tool that enable me to turn over used items that might have value to others while putting some cash in my pocket - and thus I want to maximize that cash while minimizing the risk.

I’ve come to find the following twelve points to be the best practices for an eBay seller looking to maintain a stellar reputation while minimizing eBay fees and thus maximizing personal profits.

Search carefully for any and all comparable listings before you list. Pay attention only to the items that are selling; people who have initial prices that exceed the late auction selling prices are simply handing money to eBay to list items that will fail to sell. By doing your research beforehand, you can get a firm grasp on what you can expect an item to sell for and thus determine before you ever list it whether or not you should invest the money in listing the item.

If the sale prices of identical or highly similar items are highly variable from auction to auction, use a “Buy it Now” price; otherwise, don’t waste the money. If I notice a difference in final sale price of more than 25% between two essentially identical items, I will invest the extra money and put a “Buy it Now” price on the auction equal to the highest bid. If the variation isn’t as large, I find that the investment in a “Buy it Now” listing isn’t worth the price, because with or without it, the market will bear the same approximate price.

If the item is listed with some frequency and seems to be constantly selling in an approximate price range, open the bidding very low. Many people feel that they will be “ripped off” if they don’t list an item starting at a price that covers most of their risk. However, if the market is repeatedly showing that it will always sell an item at a certain price, a higher opening price simply means that you’re giving money to eBay, as the market is showing there is minimal risk in a very low opening price.

For virtually all non-commodity items, a fixed price sale on an online auction site is a money-loser for the seller compared to other options. Obviously, if you are selling a quantity of very common and often purchased items that you require a specific amount for regardless of what the market is bearing, a fixed price sale might work for you. However, for most non-professional sellers, this is not the case and a fixed-price auction works against you.

Your auction title should simply maximize potential keywords; don’t waste characters on extra information. Your goal should be to fill out the maximum (or close to maximum) number of characters using as many matching search terms as possible while still clearly describing the item. Let’s say I am selling a Mickey Mantle baseball card. Rather than just listing “1967 Topps Mickey Mantle” as an auction title, I want to maximize my keyword matches within a 55 character limit, so I use “1967 Topps Mickey Mantle NM #150 Yankees baseball card”. Using this technique, I enable people searching for “Yankees” memorabilia to find the card, as well as people searching using a variety of combination terms.

A well-written description is almost always money in the bank. On many items, I’ll even go so far as to say why I’m selling it and some of my personal history with the item. These touches not only clarify your item - reducing liability that you are misrepresenting the item - but they also make your auction more memorable to the buyer and make the buyer more prone to “watching” the item, which means that there’s a good likelihood that they’ll keep an eye on it and eventually bid on it.

On almost all auctions, “auction upgrade” options just waste the seller’s money. The vast majority of buyers on eBay are bargain hunters, which means that they’ll look through several pages of listings to find the one that has the lowest prices on the items or item type that they’re seeking. This means that for virtually all items, “auction upgrades” such as bolding, feature placement, and so on won’t help you. They are only useful for highly specialized or “unique” items.

Be liberal in determining your overall shipping cost. This is especially true for less-expensive items. Be sure that the shipping costs included in your auction will at the very least cover your material costs in shipping the item. I usually estimate liberally what it will cost, including the shipping cost and the costs of packaging, then round up to the next even dollar; this rule of thumb has served me well time and time again.

Always make insurance available as an option - but make it very clear. Make a point of stating in your auctions that shipping insurance is available at the discretion of the buyer and indicate this preference in your auction setup. Then, if they don’t pay for the insurance, don’t provide it, and if damage occurs and the auction is disputed, you have evidence that you indicated that insurance was an option and the buyer declined it. This has been sufficient evidence for me to avoid liability when bad things have happened in shipping. It has only occurred twice in several years, but both times I was saved by my clear indication that insurance is available at the buyer’s discretion.

Bubble wrap and other leftover containers are your friends. Bubble wrap seems to consistently be the best option for wrapping items of all kinds, from hardback books to fragile items. I keep bubble wrap whenever I get it and I also have a huge roll of it that I keep in the closet for shipping items. I also use paper grocery sacks for the external covering on packages; I stow them under the sink until I am ready to ship auction items. Quite often, a double or triple layer of bubble wrap and a brown paper covering is all the packaging you need for shipment. For other items, I keep boxes (and those useful large bubbles) from Amazon.com shipments and diaper boxes; these often provide more than enough padding for safe shipment.

Never ship an item without being able to track it. If you use USPS, make sure you have delivery confirmation on your package; if you use UPS, make sure you have a tracking number. These are your proof that the item was shipped and delivered. Without them, unethical buyers can revoke payment by claiming the item was never shipped and you have no evidence to the contrary.

When delivery is confirmed, request feedback from the buyer. Once you’ve verified through tracking that the shipment has indeed arrived, send a message to the buyer requesting feedback, promising to leave positive feedback in exchange. The best chance for obtaining positive feedback is shortly after the safe arrival of an item - if you wait around, you’ll likely get no feedback at all.

Following these guidelines has led me to a 100% feedback rating after more than 300 auctions over the last several years and has also put more money in my pocket as I reduced risk and also reduced my eBay fees.

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging around in my closet looking for some old photo albums when I came across a large cardboard box with the letters PS2 written on it in huge letters. With a nostalgic smile, I popped open the box and sure enough, there was my old Playstation 2.

A lot of nice memories flooded over me: long nights playing Gran Turismo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 3 with my college friends, mostly. But as I looked at the games sitting there in the box with a thin layer of dust covering them, it occurred to me that the games had sat in my closet untouched for better than a year and I had no real interest in hooking it up and playing.

Instead, I took those games and sold them on eBay, netting me $300 in the process, money which is currently earning a good deal of interest for me as it sits there waiting on a rainy day. I did a similar thing shortly afterwards with my Magic: the Gathering cards from my high school days, which netted me several hundred dollars, and I followed this with a purging of some of my old hardback and trade paperback books that I won’t read again, netting me a few hundred dollars more. In short, I now have an extra thousand in the bank for a rainy day and a lot more space in my closet for other things that are important to me now.

It was really quite easy: I just went through my closet, realized I wouldn’t ever touch this stuff again and took it to eBay. Particularly good items to sell include DVDs, hardback and trade paperback books, video games, and pretty much anything collectible (except baseball cards - the market for these is pretty low and I discovered that my piles of 1986, 1987, and 1988 baseball cards were nearly worthless). If you’re not going to use or look at something in your closet ever again, now is probably the best possible time to liquidate it and put that money somewhere where it is working for you instead of building up dust in your closet.

Here are some unorthodox tips for selling stuff on eBay while minimizing your own cost. Not only do the tips minimize the money one has to spend on an auction, but they generate sales on par with other items in the same category (and often higher) and create very happy customers. I have been selling items on eBay for years with a 100% feedback rating using this strategy and I feel it is rock-solid.

Here are the prongs to the strategy:

No matter what the item (unless it is extremely unusual), list it for $0.01 to start bidding. “WHAT?” you shout, “I’LL GET RIPPED OFF IF I DO THIS!” No, you won’t. Have you ever noticed that pretty much any common item listed is bidded up to roughly the same price? That’s the average price the market will bear on the item. Thus, it doesn’t really matter what you list it for to begin with; all you’re doing is giving money to eBay via higher fees because you’re spending more per listing.

Even better: if you start it at such a low price, you will get a lot of active bidders and watchers on your items. Lots of active bidders means lots of competition, and sometimes you’ll get someone to bid something up really high because they just can’t stand to lose. I used to put starting prices near the average of what they might get on eBay, but I wouldn’t get many people bidding or watching the auctions. Now, I save money on the initial cost and on most items the final sale is actually higher than I expected. I win both ways!

Unless your item is extremely unusual, don’t put any “extras” on your listing. Again, on regular items like used music, DVDs, books, etc., don’t waste your money on bolding it or highlighting it. This is only useful if you have a very unique item that might otherwise be overlooked.

Add the “human aspect” when you describe what you’re selling. Tell a bit about yourself and why you’re selling the item. This makes the situation seem more “real” to the buyer; I tend to inherently trust individuals who are trying to sell old textbooks or a DVD in order to buy a crib for their new son than an individual who brags about the good deal they’re offering you. That means I’m more willing to bid up the item from the expectant parent.

Get a tracking number when you ship. This is your proof the item was delivered in case they try to claim that it was not and attempt to revoke payment. This little trick has saved me tons of grief (and lost income) over the years.

My estimate of the net gain of using these tips over the years is about $2 per auction compared to my earlier, supposedly “saner” methods.