Last week I looked into what the 2021 paperback printing of Heart of the Jedi was going for on ebay. I left off with saying that if the situation ever changes that I'd keep you all updated. Well I continued to check the numbers and it has updated, but I think that rather than make semi regular articles about how it is doing I would just make one last article with a link to the history of sold listings. That way that no matter when you see this article you can check it and have up to date information on what the current market price is.
So if you'd like to know what Heart of the Jedi has and is currently selling for you can do so here. But as always if you just want to read the story you can always do so for free at Starwarstimeline.net.
The rest of this article will be a guide on how to read the google sheet as well as an overview in the methods of gathering and calculating the data. Note that the figures in the images will most likely no longer be accurate after the first few days of posting this.
The way I got the following numbers was checking the sold listings for Heart of the Jedi. This is a feature on ebay that you toggle by clicking sold listings on the left side of the screen. The first thing you will see on the google sheet is a table of all the sold listings that I have counted, which should look like this. (Note this isn't the whole table)
It gives the date it was sold, how much it sold for, the shipping, the total with shipping and how many bids there were if it was an auction. Also the top row is frozen so you will see it when scrolling down. I chose these metrics because I wanted to see how it was doing over time, and how the price was being effected with and without shipping. The bids I just added to gauge how active people are in purchasing these.
To the right of that you will see another table of the best offers taken. This is a table I put together of every time a listing was put up but someone made an offer lower that the listing price that was accepted by the seller. These data points are not included in any calculations or graphs as since ebay doesn't say what the best offer was we don't know how much it sold for. So I included them just to have a record of them but didn't factor them into any equations.
To the right of that is the main table that shows the mean (also known as the average) and median price both with and without shipping for all the data points in the first table. It is very important to look at both mean and median as the mean can typically be very adversely effected by outliers that can skew the data, in most cases median is preferred for this reason. I included both so you could compare the two as if the mean is significantly higher or lower than the median you would know that there are outliers in that direction that are skewing the data.
Then there are two graphs, the top one is a histogram of the sold prices with shipping. It is meant to show which prices are most common. Generally you want to look at the center of the bell curve on this one as the price but if there isn't a bell curve then you want to look to where the data is trending, or rather where the highest peak is and if the other data is leading in that direction. The following is a good example of the latter.
Finally the last graph is a graph of the sold listing prices over time. With this one the important thing to look at is the trendline and if it is trending up down, or is flat. If it is flat then you can safely rely on the previous graph and mean/median table, but if it is trending up or down then the price is somewhere between where the trendline is pointing towards and the previous graph and mean/median table.
Just to use the numbers at the time of writing this as an example since, the histogram and trendline both point to the $150-$175 range but the median and mean in the $230-$250 range, thus the current market price is somewhere between those ranges. Anything higher than $250 would be paying too much and anything below $150 is a great deal.
UPDATE 5/30/21
The following are additional bits of information I added to the sheet since posting this originally. They include another chart for the sold listings and an additional table and charts for listings that failed to sell.
This is the chart of the number of bids on each of the auctions over time. It is meant to show where interest is in these books or demand. The way ebay works one user can put in multiple bids if they are outbid so a data point having 20 bids doesn't necessarily mean 20 people were competing for the sale, but it does show that at least 2 people were bidding and that it was a bit competitive. The more bids either the more people that wanted it or the more competitive those that wanted it were. As you can see most of the bids were in the 1-50 range with one outlier that saw 216 bids on a listing that sold for $176. This is likely due to the opening bid and bidding increments being low so that inflated the bidding numbers, but generally the bidding seems to be trending upwards showing that demand is still high. You can compare this with the price trends to see how the supply and demand are interacting, or in other words which is having the bigger impart on the price.
Finally you can actually check auctions that completed but didn't result in a sale. Meaning the price was too high for anyone to be interested in buying. This is useful as if you are just looking at the sold listings you can get an idea of what price is too high but you can't exactly narrow it down. With completed listings that didn't sell you can clearly see what is considered by those purchasing this book is too high.
On the Sheet these tables and graphs are to the right of the sold listings and look like this.
Most of these are auctions that include a buy it now price. The listing will look something like this and you can find them by checking the completed listings but not the sold listings, and look for those with numbers in the red.
The table thus shows the date and both the buy it now and starting bid prices. The shipping is also included which is then added to each of the previous two numbers to get a total. There is one exception to this rule as there is one listing that got 15 bids but failed to sell. In this case the bid price is the price that the bids got to. The totals were then graphed in histograms giving these two graphs.
Both cases have a couple outliers in the $1000 range that make viewing the data a bit hard but these two are still useful. Since in all but one cases they didn't receive any bids the first graph of the starting bid can be viewed as the price that is too high for people to bid, where as the bottom graph is represented by what the seller thinks is a good price. By these numbers the former would be in the $300-$350 range where as the latter is in the $250-$300 range. But these graphs are more of a tool for buyers to see what is too high a price so you aren't overpaying, so if anything check these tables before you hit the bid button.
Finally that same data put into a timeline to show the progression over time. Like with the sold listings data it is best to compare these with the histograms to get a better sense of where the price is today. Though in this case it is showing where the overpriced mark is today.
Interestingly these are both showing upward trends in the rice that is too high, where as the sales numbers are showing downward trends in the price that is acceptable. This is likely due to the much higher asking prices that have come in recently so keep that in mind when checking this graph.
But again all of this is just taking into account today's numbers. If you would like numbers accurate to whenever you are reading this you can check out the sheet here. And again, if you just want to read the story you can always do so for free at Starwarstimeline.net.
This article is part of a series of articles. Click here for the previous article in the series, and here for the next article in the series.
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