With all of the books you can buy, how do you determine the TRUE value?

It's time these price guides start to use ebay in their research. When I do appraisals, I take into account the book value for insurance purposes only, but I also give people what I call, "real price," so people can know what to count on if they ever did indeed have to sell.

A fellow ebayer once said it best: "EBay is a world-wide market, and if nobody in the entire world is willing to pay more than about average eBay selling price for an item, then that's what that item is worth (monetarily)."

If you want to get serious about appraising your collection for 'real value,' look no further than ebay's terapeak.  For free, you can search the past 14 days of ebay's history. There's also an option to purchase a subscription - it's quite reasonable and the information is abundant!

Typically you'll find that ebay value is about 20-35% of book value. Does this mean that ebay is not a great selling tool because it fetches lower prices?.... No! The other prices don't actually exist. They are pretend. They are purposely inflated by these collectibles industries to keep the prices higher and are not based in reality.

This tool is better than all the price guides in the world! It's real prices, paid by real people.  So the next time you use a book, be careful. If you want to really know what type of money you can count on, look no further than your computer.

Need a Written Appraisal, Click here to go to our Appraisal Services.

We just wrote Hummel Price Guide and Goebel Co-Boy Gnome that actually takes into account REAL prices you can REALLY get! You can purchase them here!