eBay Hacks

Foreword: This Magic Marketplace

As you will read in this book, eBay is a community, a platform, a social experiment, a successful business, and a microcosm of important Information Age precepts like “network effects,” “positive returns to scale,” “frictionless economics,” even “the changing nature of intellectual property.” eBay has a couple of dozen knockout doctoral dissertations lurking in its depths, as well as any number of statutory reforms, sermons, and life-lessons. If you haven’t played with eBay yet, you should. If you have played with eBay, this book will enrich your play further.

eBay is becoming the most important way for people to exchange goods. Exchanging goods, exchanging information, and exchanging culture are the three most important activities undertaken by human beings, with the exception of exchanging fluids (without this last exchange, the human race would die off in a generation).

eBay is a uniquely Information Age technology, and as such, it is properly ranked with other technologies that have democratized participation in the fundamental activities of our existence, like the Web itself and Napster.

When the Web was beginning, a lot of Solemn Information Clergy muttered darkly about the inevitable failure of the Internet as a “library” or an “encyclopedia.” Libraries are grown-up affairs, filled with serious books written by serious people and carefully cataloged by guardians of human knowledge into hierarchies that express the depth and breadth of all endeavors. ...