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20,000 sales records!

30 Mar 2010

Well, after the site has been officially open for just over five years, we have now collected 20,004 records of completed sales from eBay and other sites.

As usual, here is a quick presentation of the vital statistics:

The sales have resulted from 37,813 auctions started, so the success ratio (i.e., auctions resulting in a sale) is 52.90%, still trending downwards slowly. The number of successful auctions per month continues to fall, and is now at 292, from 296 after 19,000 sales.

There are 1049 different editions and variants listed separately at BDKR.com. Of those 955 (953 after 19,000 sales) have appeared in at least one successful sale, and of those, 75 (78) have appeared once only. So we continue seeing rarer and rarer editions. (In fact, Deutschland 6 (1855) is currently in auction and has not achieved a successful sale before, so we might add one more tomorrow - though there are no bids for it at the time of writing.)

Generalgouvernement remains the most sold edition with 154 sales (last time 148). Among the English-language editions, Great Britain 7 (1910) remains the most sold at 153 sales (it looks like it will soon catch up with Generalgouvernment), while the best-selling French edition is as before Sud-Est de la France 9 (1910), now on 76 sales. Of the 20,004 books, 8759 (43.8%) were in German, 8491 (42.4%) in English and 2754 (13.8%) in French - exactly unchanged proportions since last time. 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 €672,155.01, giving an average price of €33.60, 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 €1,661,285, so the ratio is now down to 40.5% from the previous 40.9%.

The average number of bids per sold book remains at 5.2. 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!

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