Beware! JC.com warns us that in Europe there is a lot of fake Judaica for sale on Ebay.
You've heard of women who try to auction off their virginity on ebay...
Fresno woman's rare baseball card nets $64,073
Fresno woman gets $64K for rare baseball card she originally tried to sell for $10
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- A Fresno antiques dealer has hit a home run with the sale of a rare baseball card she thought was worth only $10.
Bernice Gallego ended up selling the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings team card on an online auction site for $64,073 on Tuesday. That's more than double the previous record set for an identical card. The Cincinnati Red Stockings are the first professional team in the U.S.
Gallego didn't know what she had when she originally listed the card on eBay for $10. After numerous e-mails asking if it was real, she pulled the card. Only a handful of them exist.
The front of the card features a sepia-toned, gelatin-silver photographic print of the entire team. The reverse has a red-and-white advertisement for Peck & Snyder, a New York sports equipment manufacturer.
Gallego enjoyed national media attention and appeared on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" after finding the card in a box of junk.
The buyer was Jeff Rosenberg, president of a Houston company that promotes sports memorabilia shows.
As long as I am on the subject today of Ebay, yes there is that other side of the coin. The dark side. The Ebay site allows for the quick and easy disposal of stolen merchandise. Here is a story that shocks us, but does not surprise us.New York halts sale of historic documents on eBay
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York state employee who had access to government-owned archives has been arrested on suspicion of stealing hundreds of historic documents, many of which he sold on eBay, authorities said on Monday.
Among the missing documents were a 1823 letter by Vice President John C. Calhoun and copies of the Davy Crockett Almanacs, pamphlets written by the frontiersman who died at the Alamo in Texas.
Daniel Lorello, 54, of Rensselaer, New York, was charged with grand larceny, possession of stolen property and fraud after an alert history buff saw the items posted on the online auction site. The history buff believed the documents were state property and informed authorities, the state attorney general's office said.
The four-page letter from Calhoun drew bids of more than $1,700 while being monitored by investigators.
The attorney general's office has recovered hundreds of other documents that it said were traced to Lorello, an archivist with the Department of Education who has been placed on administrative leave. Officials are trying to determine what may have been sold.
"This individual had access to a wide array of the state library's collection," which includes an original first draft of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and complete set of autographs from the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement.
EBay auctions posted by Lorello included a Currier & Ives lithograph that he described as "in excellent condition." The Calhoun letter auction said "100 percent satisfaction is guaranteed."
EBay was cooperating with state officials.
We know this. Everyone knows this. Ebay saves buyers money and gives sellers liquidity.Study shows eBay buyers save billions of dollars
By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Buyers save billions of dollars each year bidding on eBay auctions, according to a new study that quantifies the benefits online consumers enjoy over and above what is derived by sellers, or eBay itself.
The independent research by two statisticians from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business found buyers saved $7 billion that they might have otherwise been ready to pay in a study of eBay auction behavior in 2003.
Applying the same analysis to 2004 buyer data, consumers saved $8.4 billion, said Wolfgang Jank, one author of the study. A linear projection of the research findings would mean consumers saved around $19 billion during 2007, Jank said.
The study seeks to calculate what economists call "consumer surplus" -- the difference between the top price buyers were ready to pay and what they actually ended up paying. E-commerce sites provide a treasure trove of data that allows researchers to test out theories of consumer behavior.
"Consumer surplus is usually very hard to measure," said study co-author Galit Shmueli. "The problem is that it is hard to ascertain how much a winner or a bidder or a user would have been willing to pay for a certain item."
Jank and Shmueli are associate professors of decision and information technologies at the University of Maryland. They collaborated with Ravi Bapna, an associate professor at the Indian School of Business, who generated data for the study.
The study highlights the delicate balance eBay must strike between the interests of buyers and sellers on its site....
Tired of reading about commercial films that you can download for free from some pirate web site? Here is the counter news story from the Times Bits blog. Turns out that you can actually pay for free public domain movies. Of course if you do pay for free content, you will have to confess to this and ask for atonement in the list of your sins on Yom Kippur.On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s FreeWhile scouring eBay for interesting Christmas presents a while back, I found and bought a DVD of a film made in 1954 about my home town of Doylestown, Pa. After it arrived I went searching for more information about it — and found the entire film, available as a free download from the nonprofit Internet Archive.
It turned out that the eBay seller had simply downloaded the movie file, burned it onto a DVD and stuck it in the mail. And he was doing the same with a wide range of other public-domain material: military truck manuals from World War II, PowerPoint presentations on health matters from government doctors, vaudeville shorts from the late 1800’s.
The seller’s name is Jeffrey; he wouldn’t give his last name because, he said, strange buyers sometimes want to come by his house to pay for things in person. In an interview, Jeffrey said that he spends 20 to 30 hours a week working on his eBay business at his home near Dayton, Ohio. He wouldn’t say how much money he makes, but indicated that it was worth the time he was putting into it.
Jeffrey’s auction listings do say the material is in the public domain, and he acknowledges that it is all out there on the Web for those who know where to find it. But he said some of his customers were people who might not know how to turn a downloaded file into something they could watch on a TV or play on a CD player. Some have dial-up Internet connections that would choke on a 600-megabyte compilation of technical manuals. Others don’t have the time or expertise to search for specific information.
“Some people say ‘I could have gotten this on my own,’ but a lot of my stuff is very difficult to find,” he said.
Other sellers have gotten into the business since Jeffrey started doing this seriously in 1999, so sales are down somewhat. He estimated that there are 10 to 20 people selling public-domain material on eBay, and he said they watched each others’ auctions for clues as to what buyers might want. PowerPoint presentations from government sites, particularly on medical topics, are his latest niche.
Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian of the Internet Archive and a co-founder of the organization, said his group had no problem with people selling material from its online collection in this way. “There’s nobody making a lot of money off of this kind of thing,” he said.
Mr. Kahle added that he would, of course, like to see people making more creative use of the material, as in the case of this mashup of old instructional films and new footage that a couple made to show at their wedding.
I felt a little cheated when I found out that I had paid Jeffrey for a free movie. But at a time when there is so much focus on copyrighted material being ripped from CDs and DVDs and set loose on the Internet, it’s an interesting twist to find people taking non-copyrighted material in the other direction — and making some money from it.
Then there is the simple fact that if the film hadn’t ended up on eBay, I most likely would never have seen it — or given it to my dad, who got a kick out of it.
“I’m performing services much like Lexis-Nexis or any other company that sells data,” Jeffrey said. “Somebody has to do that research.”
