This (Amazon Third-)Party Is Getting Out Of Hand

I have long been a book collector. Well, to be precise, I am a book scout. I love finding books for less than they are worth, and then selling them, because, despite what you might assume, I’ve never been someone who needed to have a lot of books on my shelves, and I’m also not fastidious enough to care for rare or collectible books; I’m likely to tear the dust jacket or some such. Anyway, point is, one of my hobbies is to frequent thrift stores and flea markets and antique stores and look for first editions to flip.

I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve sold books at a variety of online places. Often, what motivates me to list and sell my finds is some vacation I want to take. The first such selling frenzy I did was via eBay, and I made enough for my son and I to take a trip to Ireland. But eBay is pretty brutal for sellers (the customer is always right), and I was kicked off (one person bought 7 books, and then complained 7 times, and that was enough to jigger the algorithms to …