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wombat1138Have more or less settled into the routine of my bonus volunteering gig at the main city library once a week, in addition to the two afternoons at a smaller local branch. They've been talking for years about getting online sales set up, but it never went anywhere until this summer. Now I've got a two-hour midday shift listing books on Amazon at the mother ship.
I gather that at the main library, the booksale division has been run for years by a small cabal of sweet little old ladies who have always done things in a certain way and didn't want to change anything. Meanwhile, the libraries in nearby cities were setting up their own Amazon storefronts, making our librarians gnash with envy whenever they got together at a county shindig and heard how much the other libraries were pulling in. Finally, we got someone who'd helped set up one of the other Amazon storefronts-- I don't remember whether she retired and they lured her back as a consultant, or whether she was laid off by the other city because of budget constraints-- and we were off and running within weeks.
The library's budget really has been pinched rather nastily. In the cube farm where the online booksale facilities are set up, there's almost no one else around when I'm there. (It could be their lunch break. I dunno.) A lot of the full-time staff were cut down to half-time or less; likewise, a number of part-timers were just plain laid off. (This makes me even more cross about the branch page whom I'm increasingly inclined to think is just plain Not Competent at his reshelving duties even when he *does* do them instead of sacking out in a corner reading magazines. However, I suspect that he has seniority and nothing can be done about him.)
So last Friday, I took on a box of collected classics-- part of what seems to be a recurrently repackaged set called the "Harvard Classics Five-Foot Shelf of Books". (IIRC the entire set had originally been donated, but the booksale gatekeepers tossed some of them.) These were all from 1908-1910 with blue leatherette covers. It was obvious that they'd been mainly left on the shelf as decorative items; the spines were faded, but the front/back covers and pages were in beautiful shape, with little or no wear. They were all in pretty much the same condition, so I settled on a standard description and started to tap my way through the individual listings-- find the right volume, make sure it's the right printing, adjust description as necessary, settle on a price based on the existing competition; rinse and repeat. I got through about thirty of them before my shift ran out, so I left a note on the remaining ten volumes about the cut/paste routine and headed out.
At the end of the day, I rechecked the storefront out of curiosity wrt how many books had gotten listed by the volunteer in the shift after me. I think she managed five, though all of them were individual books instead of more of the set. This still made me smug, as I'd listed eight individual books before getting the set started.
So this morning before heading out, I rechecked the storefront to see whether they'd finished listing the last ten books from the set. I didn't see them... but I also didn't see most of the set books that I'd listed last week. I was pretty incredulous that someone might've already bought that many of them, but the volunteer coordinator had mentioned that some of the books might be pulled back out for the in-house booksale next month. I figured that's what had happened, shrugged it off, and went in.
About an hour into my shift, the coordinator dropped by and filled me in. During the week, someone else started to work on the remaining volumes and noticed that some sellers have bulk partial-set listings; thinking that we should do the same thing, the someone else started to remove the individual volume listings in preparation for a partial-set lot. And then TPTB decided that no, that was a bad idea because of shipping costs, put back the individual listings-- except that they'd been removed in some non-standard way that made the listings unrecoverable, and they'd have to be individually re-entered again.
The coordinator graciously told me that since I'd done such a good job with those books last week, she thought that to avoid any further confusion, I should be the only person to deal with listing the books in that set. The ten remaining ones that hadn't been listed at all, and the twentyish ones that would now have to be re-entered.
I believe my exact thoughts at that moment were "HELL NO I just listed those last week. I refuse to list them AGAIN." (External reaction was limited to "Oh dear" and a faint grimace, iirc.)
If she'd told me earlier in the shift, I might've given it a try-- the cut/paste routine last week was pretty soothing once I got the hang of it-- or at least had more time to recover from being extremely pissed. And I'll probably go back to them next week. But I didn't lay a finger on them this time, and am still (obviously) somewhat vexed.
Meanwhile, stats for this week-- moi: 14 new individual listings plus 4 sales packaged and shipped; person immediately after me: 4 new listings. Hah.
I gather that at the main library, the booksale division has been run for years by a small cabal of sweet little old ladies who have always done things in a certain way and didn't want to change anything. Meanwhile, the libraries in nearby cities were setting up their own Amazon storefronts, making our librarians gnash with envy whenever they got together at a county shindig and heard how much the other libraries were pulling in. Finally, we got someone who'd helped set up one of the other Amazon storefronts-- I don't remember whether she retired and they lured her back as a consultant, or whether she was laid off by the other city because of budget constraints-- and we were off and running within weeks.
The library's budget really has been pinched rather nastily. In the cube farm where the online booksale facilities are set up, there's almost no one else around when I'm there. (It could be their lunch break. I dunno.) A lot of the full-time staff were cut down to half-time or less; likewise, a number of part-timers were just plain laid off. (This makes me even more cross about the branch page whom I'm increasingly inclined to think is just plain Not Competent at his reshelving duties even when he *does* do them instead of sacking out in a corner reading magazines. However, I suspect that he has seniority and nothing can be done about him.)
So last Friday, I took on a box of collected classics-- part of what seems to be a recurrently repackaged set called the "Harvard Classics Five-Foot Shelf of Books". (IIRC the entire set had originally been donated, but the booksale gatekeepers tossed some of them.) These were all from 1908-1910 with blue leatherette covers. It was obvious that they'd been mainly left on the shelf as decorative items; the spines were faded, but the front/back covers and pages were in beautiful shape, with little or no wear. They were all in pretty much the same condition, so I settled on a standard description and started to tap my way through the individual listings-- find the right volume, make sure it's the right printing, adjust description as necessary, settle on a price based on the existing competition; rinse and repeat. I got through about thirty of them before my shift ran out, so I left a note on the remaining ten volumes about the cut/paste routine and headed out.
At the end of the day, I rechecked the storefront out of curiosity wrt how many books had gotten listed by the volunteer in the shift after me. I think she managed five, though all of them were individual books instead of more of the set. This still made me smug, as I'd listed eight individual books before getting the set started.
So this morning before heading out, I rechecked the storefront to see whether they'd finished listing the last ten books from the set. I didn't see them... but I also didn't see most of the set books that I'd listed last week. I was pretty incredulous that someone might've already bought that many of them, but the volunteer coordinator had mentioned that some of the books might be pulled back out for the in-house booksale next month. I figured that's what had happened, shrugged it off, and went in.
About an hour into my shift, the coordinator dropped by and filled me in. During the week, someone else started to work on the remaining volumes and noticed that some sellers have bulk partial-set listings; thinking that we should do the same thing, the someone else started to remove the individual volume listings in preparation for a partial-set lot. And then TPTB decided that no, that was a bad idea because of shipping costs, put back the individual listings-- except that they'd been removed in some non-standard way that made the listings unrecoverable, and they'd have to be individually re-entered again.
The coordinator graciously told me that since I'd done such a good job with those books last week, she thought that to avoid any further confusion, I should be the only person to deal with listing the books in that set. The ten remaining ones that hadn't been listed at all, and the twentyish ones that would now have to be re-entered.
I believe my exact thoughts at that moment were "HELL NO I just listed those last week. I refuse to list them AGAIN." (External reaction was limited to "Oh dear" and a faint grimace, iirc.)
If she'd told me earlier in the shift, I might've given it a try-- the cut/paste routine last week was pretty soothing once I got the hang of it-- or at least had more time to recover from being extremely pissed. And I'll probably go back to them next week. But I didn't lay a finger on them this time, and am still (obviously) somewhat vexed.
Meanwhile, stats for this week-- moi: 14 new individual listings plus 4 sales packaged and shipped; person immediately after me: 4 new listings. Hah.