Obscure used books on Amazon tend to get automatically bid up to astronomical prices, as the repricing bots mistake the noise of an empty market for a signal: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

As of this moment, the most expensive book on Amazon is going for one billion dollars: http://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A283155&field-is-available-new...

There's an insurance scam just waiting to happen here.

No, it's just automated pricing based on it being rare. You set a high price, other pricing bots come in and undercut it - unless the book is sufficiently rare or obscure, in which case the high price remains.

Funnily enough, my book is a good example of this. There's three copies on Amazon, priced within 1 cent of each other: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1898275351/ref=dp_olp... It was one of the elss well-selling ones in the series so it's become 'rare' by virtue of its own obscurity, rather than inherent merit of its own :-)

Note to self: set up own pricing bot to bid rare books down to cheap rates and then snap them up. Finally that copy of the Dune Encyclopedia will be mine!

EDIT: Apparently it can be had for only £15 now. How depressing.