News items

Stats at 19,000

23 Nov 2009

As mentioned in the previous post, we have got to 19,017 recorded sales from online auctions. Here are the usual statistics:

The sales have resulted from 35,721 auctions started, so the success ratio (i.e., auctions resulting in a sale) is 53.24%, just a little down from last time. The number of successful auctions per month has continued dropping, and is now just under 296 from 305 last time, although there has been a slight improvement recently.

There are 1049 different editions and variants listed separately at BDKR.com Of those 953 (950 after 18,000 sales) have appeared in at least one successful sale, and of those, 78 (82) have appeared once only. So we are slowly hauling in even the rarest editions.

Generalgouvernement remains the most sold edition with 148 sales (last time 144). It is remarkable how this edition appears much less frequently now than a few years ago. Among the English-language editions, Great Britain 7 (1910) remains the most sold at 145 sales (inexorably catching up with Generalgouvernment), while the best-selling French edition is as before Sud-Est de la France 9 (1910) on 73 sales. Of the 19,017 books, 8321 (43.8%) were in German, 8061 (42.4%) in English and 2635 (13.9%) in French - pretty much unchanged proportions. So it remains a steady rule of thumb that, out of seven sold books, three are in German, three in English and one in French.

The total sale price for the books was €645,287.65, giving an average price of €33.93, which also continues a very slowly falling trend. If all the books had gone for their BDKR guideline price, the total sales would have been €1,579,000, so the ratio is continuing to edge down to 40.9% from the previous 41.4%. But we still haven't had any major sales recently, so that's not very surprising.

The average number of bids per sold book has come down to 5.2, a tenth of a bid since last time. As ever, just treat these stats as a bit of fun - nothing to take too seriously. They also appear in shortened form every day on the stats page. If you'd like some other data, please feel free to ask!

Other items...