Retail value

Since this is a catalogue of books that I own, it would be an interesting statistic to see how much $ I have hypothetically invested in this library. So how about fetching the suggested retail values of these books. Now obviously no one will have paid full price for all their books. But it's like "Deal or No Deal" -- the statistic can tell you something about how good of a book collecting deal you have made. And then you could have cool little bar graphs that tell you the total retail values for every decade. If we catalogued the approximate dates for when books were acquired, we could get an idea of how well we have developed the library during different time intervals. This feature wouldn't have to be limited to retail value--it could be combined with any tag. So you could see when you went through your blue years or fresco phase of your life. The reason I would really like a quick and easy way to fetch retail values is for insurance purposes. Please, bring it on! I love this LibraryThing thang!

Doesn't really make sense to me (from a statistical pov).

Some libraries on here would be almost completely second-hand, some would be almost all new books, most are a mixture. Some people even buy books at inflated collector prices (a first of The Reality Dysfunction now goes for £250-£350 retail). Also retail value is also dependant on condition. So you cannot just take a number from abebook - the price varies with edition and condition.

Might work for the yanks and the poms (perhaps), but where would you get prices for kiwis, or Austrians, for example? Sounds pretty impossible.

You don't have to go back too far to not even find books at all, let alone get prices for them, given I had an example from 2005.

what might work is to have a field for cover value and (maybe) one for price paid. This is what I used to do when I kept paper records of the books I bought. I suspect it combined with publishing date it would then be possible to come up with all sorts of statistics...

I suspect the only way to get current market value would be if Librarything partnered with a used book site or something...

I would like fields for cover price, price paid, and source - it wouldn't ever be anywhere near complete data but for newer acquisitions it would be handy.

I pointed out to my husband today that if, at an extremely conservative estimate, the replacement value of the books in our house is £5, the total is high enough to warrant listing the library separately on our insurance policy and upping the cover. Since I know I have quite a few books worth considerably more than this to replace, we really need to talk to our advisor about it... LT data in support would be very useful!

LT is, in fact, partnered with a used book site: ABEbooks.

If it was possible to add this information, I would only consider inputting it for my own collection if the information was private. Who wants to advertise that you paid twice what you should have for some gem you just had to have or that you found some other gem for $1 at a library or yard sale?

I'd be much more eager to be able to track sources, condition, edition and printing, and similar info, prefereably in a manner consistent with abebooks.

I don't really care what other people paid for their library. I think it would be valuable to keep track of my own library both retail value and price paid.

This is actually a feature I'm dreading. Meaning I don't want it. I don't want to know how much money I've spent on books. Plus, I buy books in every country I go to. So I have books bought in Switzerland, Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, USA, South Africa.... the list is endless. Therefore it would be in countless different currencies and there would be no point in converting them into one single currency (to be able to tell the total). But as I fill in every field I can, I just know I would do it.... So please let this be the one feature NOT included in LT.
By the way, retail value here is a lot higher than e.g. in the USA and for about half of my books I can't even remember anymore where I got them...

I was thinking about using my LibraryThing list for insurance purposes, too, so I would love it if the full cover price for the book were pulled in from Amazon, and then there could be another field for price paid or something like that, so the user could input how much he/she paid for the book.

Like Thalia, I would dread having such a feature - one more thing to obsess over and kill time with!

Seriously, pulling prices off Amazon is highly unreliable - I tried it with some book software programs and one always ends up with the Amazon price which is often discounted and has almost no correlation to what one actually pays, whether you buy stuff new, discounted, remaindered, with tax, with shipping, etc. So you practically end up entering all the fields manually.

For insurance purposes, having the Amazon price would be useful. For most of my non-collectible books, if I were to replace them, I wouldn't really care if they were new or used-in-good-condition.

Agree, would very much like to add price to my library items. Automatically the current Amazon new book list price at the time I add a book to my librarything collection, and also want to manually enter my personal actual acquisition price. Would also like running totals of these two prices for my entire library for insurance and budgeting purposes.

I'm also very interested in having a field for, at the minimum, "price paid," although "source" would also be nice. This would be served just as well by having custom fields, however, and perhaps that wouldn't cause as much difficulty for people who don't want to be tempted into recording this information? (I would be happy with, say, four fields called Custom #1, Custom #2, &c, although I'm sure other people have different desires.)

Privacy control over those fields, whatever their form, would also be nice. At the moment I'm recording price and source in my "Comments" field and uneasily accepting the display of vulgar currency and potential for embarassment. However, I'm contemplating keeping two records, one on LT of what's on my bookshelves, and another in a database program of all the books I've ever owned, with all the excess information about price and such in the latter. While this means double the entry work it should fully satisfy both the obsessive private-data-collector and the wireless social-library-internet geek sides of my cataloguing impulse.

Although, while I'm talking about things I do with my book data, I also have started recording the locations of all the bookstores from which I have purchased books on a personal Google map. How does geotagging sound for a potential site improvement?

Don't forget to take various currencies into account in the hypothetical price paid field.

I'm definitely torn over this. Like #9, I dread it in certain ways... the first thing that comes to my mind is the horror of realizing how much money I've spent on all these books, that could've gone to something sensible like rent. I would feel so guilty and I would probably end up deleting all the price info or something...

However, I do see certain practical purposes in it... Though I don't have any insurance whatsoever now, if I ever do I know certain books and groups of books would be in there...

I don't know. I'm leaning toward no, but if anything it'd be okay as an optional feature... I just don't want it as one of those things I see glaring at me every time I come to LT, just tempting me to do it.

Heather

"the horror of realizing how much money I've spent on all these books, that could've gone to something sensible like rent"

Awww, c'mon ... remember the words of Erasmus:
"when I get a little money, I buy books, and if any is left, I buy food and clothes"!