OK, so I sold my old Organic Chemistry text from MIT. It’s a SIX POUND BOOK. How did I first find this out? By checking Amazon.com.

If you sell a book through Amazon, you set the price and they give you some compensation for shipping. Somehow they can’t figure out that THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW MUCH THE BOOK WEIGHS. So they only give you postage for a 2 pound book. And no money for the padded envelope they expect you to use. If you order something from Amazon yourself, you get charged shipping and handling. Why don’t they give it to you, as an affiliate bookseller? Is it because AMAZON IS EVIL?

Anyway, I didn’t realize that I’d get screwed on shipping. I put the book up for $1.95, to get rid of it. $1.95-Amazon’s cut ($1.28) + Amazon’s allowed shipping ($2.26) – real shipping ($3.52) is a loss of $0.59. It’s worth it to get rid of that huge honking waste of bookshelf space, but IT COULD HAVE GONE IN THE BONFIRE. I guess that’s the price I pay for “recycling” the book.