Dick Hosmer wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2017 at 2:27pm:

No, I have not. Joe is scaling back his operation, which is why I had to go to CreateSpace/Amazon to do my second book. I do have another question though. What algorithm or circumstance produces the absurdly    wild prices seen (ocasionally in four figures) on Amazon for some recent paperbacks? In the case of the SRS books (which never show up at a reasonable price) I believe it is legit, but some of the others are ridiculous.

I'm a noob when it comes to Krags so I am excited that there is a question here I can answer!!!

The reason you have seen books listed on Amazon for OUTRAGEOUS prices is very simple... they are actually out of stock.

The way these book dealers are handling their sales and inventory is the key to the problem.  When a seller lists a book on Amazon, they get charged when they sell the book and mark it out of stock... regardless of where they sell it.  To prevent having to pay to relist it (and get charged a commission upon selling) these sellers simply adjust the price to some humongous amount whenever they are out of stock.  When they get a copy back on their shelf, they put the price back down to what it should be.

It ends up being a really failed system, because people who have a copy of an old book will look on Amazon to see what it is worth and they think they are RICH!!  Then they spend 6 months trying to sell a cheap book for 30 times it's true value with no success.  It amazes me that Amazon has not changed the process to compensate for this, but until they do, we will see all kinds of low demand books listed at expensive prices and all are secretly out of stock, although they show them as available ;)