Expensive Books

One of the few good things about Amazon’s decision to scrap their tried and trusted search engine and go with a buggy, ill-considered, feature-lite A9 search system instead is that you can put nothing in the search field and still get results. Yes, if you leave it blank, the engine brings back EVERY SINGLE item in their catalogue. Try it – the books one brings back 5,915,171 results. Scroll down a bit and you can filter your results by price. There are, apparently, 3266 books for sale at Amazon UK which cost over a grand. That has to be worth a look surely?

The first three are part of the current trend for absurdly expensive but beautifully produced books chronicling sporting icons. They weigh a tonne, they are autographed to buggery and they are instantly collectable because they are individually numbered. Unless you are Telos publishing, that is a sure-fire way of making things instantly desirable.

The Ali book – "GOAT" – has been around for a few years now and is still in stock so the limited print run and instant collectableness of it may have been a little over stated.

The Pele book is slightly cheaper but no less massive. I wonder if it covers his erectile dysfunction adverts?

And finally we have the Manchester United "Opus" – the newest, the most expensive and the only one they appear to have sold out of. Either that or it was Amazon’s warehouse that was raided and which had six of the books stolen by international book thieves. According to the Daily Mail, two of them have surfaced in China and Memphis, TN. None in Manchester. Typical.

Say what you will about those books – valuable pieces of sporting memorabilia or over-price exploitative tat – at least you can understand them. A book about Pele will have lots of pictures of yellow shirted goal scoring, lots of lists of yellow shirted goal scoring and lots of graphs explaining that there is nothing to be ashamed about in suffering from erectile dysfunction. But you would need to have lived a much less conventional life to be able to appreciate these three volumes.

There is something akin to a slap in the face at being charged a £1.99 fee for Amazon to track down a copy of a book that is costing you £9133.28. But you have to weigh that against qualifying for free shipping so it is swings and roundabouts.

Still, at least you can save yourself £4249.58 by buying the last one second hand. Yay for the internet.

A couple of food related ones stood out. Firstly, those obsessed with Maltese cuisine can pay £25.35 per page for the wittily titled "Cooking Maltese Cuisine".

And cheese fans worried about the future of industrial cheese in Europe can have their fears confirmed or dispelled (I couldn’t find any spoilers so I don’t know how it ends) for the snappy price of £8,751.99.

You’re probably saying to yourself "this column is COMPLETELY UNREASONABLE as some of the prices are almost certainly mistakes and therefore you’d have to be LOWER THAN A COCKROACH to make fun of them". Well, possibly. But Amazon’s quality control is pretty rigid and errors are almost impossible to get through the net. Witness this book about organic chemistry which is listed in the "Crime and Thrillers" section because the editor has a strangely familiar name.

Another second hand bargain can be had if you really fancy this first hand account of  life as a curator.

Is it me or does this next book sound a bit gay?

Unlike this final one which is art, dammit, and not just porn for people with no internet connection, no enlightened newsagents near by and way too much money.

Either that or they’ve seen the cover and gone "Wow – is that David Beckham?"

You could get 14 years membership to the best porn site on the internet for that price.

Probably.

I wouldn’t know.

Obviously.