This is insane:
Charging 1000s of dollars for a used book does indeed seem pretty crazy - but I guess it’s a crude case of supply and demand.
If and when the publisher decides to do a reprint of this particular title, an old second hand copy would hardly be worth the price of a smoke! (And at that point in time, any poor sucker who had just bought the copy linked to above would be feeling pretty sick! :-D)
“supply and demand”, yeah, I see a ton of people clamoring to learn Turkish, Mongolian, and Bengali!
Well, if I’ve understood correctly there is only one single copy of Colloquial Mongolian currently available on Amazon, right? If that’s the case then, even if only one single person out there seriously wanted (or needed) the book, I guess he/she would just have to swallow hard and pay the asking price!
But you can bet that the very next day after paying over the odds like this, there would be news of a fresh print run on the title - it’s called Murphy’s Law! 
I’ve come across some pretty high prices for old Assimil books, like this one:
I’ve never used Teach Yourself, but I much prefer the Assimils from the 1950s compared with more modern Assimil editions, I find them a bit watered down in terms of content. Of course this often means shelling out some extra cash (although even $200 seems a bit steep to me for a book!) Does anyone know how the older Teach Yourself books compare with the newer ones?
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@lapoubelle: “…Does anyone know how the older Teach Yourself books compare with the newer ones?..”
The older Teach Yourself Books are generally much better - but it always depends on the individual title.
For example: the modern edition of TY Arabic is actually much better than the old one, in my opinion. And I’d say the modern TY Latin (the one authored by GDA Sharply) is also very much superior to the old one.
On the other hand, if you are dealing with titles like TY Spanish, TY Russian, TY Icelandic, TY Dutch, TY Finnish, TY Welsh, TY Turkish, TY Serbocroat…well…let’s say that the older editions are just in a completely different class!
There are some titles - such as TY New Testament Greek, TY Afrikaans, TY Norwegian - where it would perhaps be a fairly close call between the old and the new editions. (There are, however, other reasons for avoiding the older edition of TY Norwegian - as anyone who has read the book will know!)
I have come across these “offers” too while looking for some books that were no longer available through my local bookstore or amazon. However, I always thought those prices were just the result of somebody typing in the wrong figures 
I don’t think that anybody would seriously ask EUR 500.00 for a book like TY “whatever”
But as Jay said, if you really want something and you cannot get it anywhere else, you might actually try and bite the bullet. Nevertheless, these prices are simply outrageous.
ad Jay: As for all the other TY titles you mentioned, have you actually tried to study all these languages? If so, you were obviously hiding your light under a bushel when you told me you know “only” two foreign languages. Because even if you just browsed through some of these books I’m sure you have a much wider knowledge than you suggested in one of your last postings.
ad odiernod: (…) “supply and demand”, yeah, I see a ton of people clamoring to learn Turkish, Mongolian, and Bengali! (…)
Actually, Turkish seems to be getting more and more popular, not just here in Austria but also amongst multi-lingual people I know from youtube and other places. Richard, Amir, Loki (or “Felix”), Fasulye, etc. all either speak and/or study Turkish. It is also on the list of languages I’d like to study in future.
I’m not sure about Mongolian and Bengali, but I’m convinced that Turkish will become even more popular.
I think I FOUND THE ANSWER.
It has nothing to do with supply and demand or the value of the books, but it has to do with the automated book selling process.
This article explains it all:
“Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies”
ad polyglot2: Intriguing article. Still kind of weird that people would rely on that kind of software to calculate prices.
ad Robert:
“…ad Jay: As for all the other TY titles you mentioned, have you actually tried to study all these languages? If so, you were obviously hiding your light under a bushel when you told me you know “only” two foreign languages. Because even if you just browsed through some of these books I’m sure you have a much wider knowledge than you suggested in one of your last postings…”
I have to confess that I do indeed own a copy of each and every one of the titles which I mentioned above! (Well, what can I say? Over the years I have built up a pretty huge library of language resources - it has become a kind of eccentric habit I guess.)
Notwithstanding your very kind words above, I would have to say that I really haven’t learned more than a few simple basics by flicking through these books. There are some Germanic languages like Dutch, Norwegian, Afrikaans where I can listen to songs or podcasts and maybe understand a certain limited amount - but this is mostly due to a kind of “crossover effect” from my C1 German (and native English) rather than a result of any real command on my part.
It’s a similar story with the Romance languages: many moons ago I had a (roughly) B2 level in Italian (very rusty now, I fear!) However, I find that I can passively understand some Spanish and French on the back of this rusty grasp of Italian.
Probably I could re-activate my Italian (or learn another Germanic language) pretty quickly and painlessly if only I could find the motivation to do so. The trouble is, it quickly becomes somewhat boring for me - it just feels like drinking cold coffee, somehow… On the other hand, trying to learn something completely new (a Slavic language or Chinese, for example) feels like going right back to square one. It is such a formidable challenge that I find myself thinking: “heck, life is too short for this!”
Back when I was in my 20s I used to have a kind of drive and passion for languages. I suppose the sad truth is that I no longer have that now.
A lot of resellers do not actually have the books in their possession. When you order the book, they order the book from another supplier. Therefore, they use an automated system to always make sure that their selling price is higher than the price from the other seller (so that they can earn a profit) while other sellers want to maximize their profit and never want to offer the lowest price, but want to be just slightly below the highest price. You automate this process and prices start increasing exponentially from there.
Seller A offers a book for $10. Seller B doesn’t have the book, but will purchase from seller A (after you buy), so offers to sell it for $14.00. Seller A’s system sees that the book is now offered by Seller B for $14.00, so raises its price to $13.00 (so as not to be the lowest, but still not the highest). Seller B’s system sees that the book is now being sold by Seller A for $13.00, so raises its price to $17.00 and so on and so forth…
Well the average price of TY books where I live in Ontario is the same, around $20.00 for each book. 