How do YOU feel about the "price guide" in the OSPG?

[Jeffro.]

I feel what I feel,when I feel it.Only to look back and question whether I felt it quite the same way as I have felt it before.and that's how I feel about that.

 

That's pretty good. Too bad you already have a custom title.

[oakman29]

I don't understand how anyone could complain about anything that makes it so easy to get underpriced books all over the country. It's un fathomable. The fact that the OSPG sucks is the greatest thing about it.

 

Yep. Dealers count on the guide to obtain books on the cheap - and who, I ask, sets those prices? The dealers, perhaps...

 

The OSPG doesn't want to come into the digital age. Period. I'm frankly surprised Heritage has worked it out so they can offer the guide in digital format. Bob Overstreet is missing out on a very large revenue stream by not offering an updated version of the guide online.

 

How does one keep track of all those books to reflect current market prices? Oh, I don't know...maybe computers? Algorithms? A little work? Buying access to data, perhaps? There's far too much technology available out there to use the excuse that it would be too much work. GPA seems to not have any trouble doing it.

 

I buy the OSPG every year and while Overstreet badly needs to embrace technology to make itself more viable, I'll continue to buy the guide each year regardless.

 

Me too! And besides, who could miss Rick Whitelocks market report.

[mackenzie999]

I'll weigh in with one thing: people have said Overstreet doesn't have the resources to make his guide more comprehensive. If that is the case, either get out of the guide business or adjust the guide's cover price accordingly. $30-something is a lot to spend on a book you don't have much faith in.

[Bookery]

I use OSPG to help discount books when I want to have a sale for slow-moving books. Going at 50% of OSPG is a good motivator, and that's part of the need for the guide as well.

 

Exactly. Right now, about 80% of all of my gold, silver and bronze-era stock is priced about 50% off OPG. But at that level, the books sell quickly, and often times to other dealers. I'm willing to move books quickly and accept fairly low margins based on volume, but obviously other dealers can take these books to larger markets and get anywhere from 25% off guide to guide for them, or they wouldn't be buying them off me in the first place.

 

I can't imagine there is any price ANY guide could come up with from which a lot of enterprising dealers wouldn't be knocking off fairly strong percentages. That is the nature of competition. Again, OPG needs to stop spending its resources on adding thousands of the latest issues every year to the book and concentrate on true collectibles... that would help on keeping up with the hotter books to the extent that it is possible.

 

For the past couple of years I have been working on and tweaking a price guide format that I believe would truly revolutionize the way raw books are collected and valued... IF the proper information could be gathered. Unfortunately, the time it would take to assemble such data is probably more that I've got on this planet, or at best would arrive so many years down the road that too many changes might occur inbetween to make it moot. Nevertheless I chip away at it from time to time, as an entertaining exercise.

 

[Dr. Balls]

Bob Overstreet is missing out on a very large revenue stream by not offering an updated version of the guide online.

 

Absolutely. Imagine a half-year addendum to the guide for $4.99 or less - I believe he'd do well with that concept, pay for his efforts and lock in some additional brand loyalty.

[Bio-Rupp]

I feel what I feel,when I feel it.Only to look back and question whether I felt it quite the same way as I have felt it before.and that's how I feel about that.

 

 

Is that a young Roy ?

[Boba]

I use the OPG as a back-stop for key books (bottom-line pricing) a point-of-reference for starting price of non-key books. Blend in GPA and other resources like comparable listings, Comiclink, Heritage, eBay (usually covered by GPA) and other factors, like board sales for instance - to gauge a book's price.

[delekkerste]

the price guide is worthless.

 

+ 1,000

 

It makes me when people try to defend the OSPG by saying things like, "well, everyone knows that, for this segment of books, you have to multiply Guide by 4x to get to the right price, and for this other segment of books, everyone knows that you have to take 30-50% off of Guide values..." I mean, here's a novel concept: just report the most accurate values possible so people don't have to apply arbitrary multipliers to adjust every inaccurate number in the Guide.

[Silver]

I buy the digital download from Heritage each year and use it for reference only. For that purpose, it is still valuable, the pricing part is almost irrelevant.

[Dr. Balls]

the price guide is worthless.

 

+ 1,000

 

It makes me when people try to defend the OSPG by saying things like, "well, everyone knows that, for this segment of books, you have multiply Guide by 4x to get to the right price, and for this other segment of books, everyone knows that you have to take 30-50% off of Guide values..." I mean, here's a novel concept: just report the most accurate values possible so people don't have to apply arbitrary multipliers to adjust every inaccurate number in the Guide.

 

So without a baseline, how would you determine the value of a book? By taking in reports from Ebay? Paying someone to comb through sales of the CGC boards? GPA is doing that now, but is missing being able to account for private sales, convention sales and sales in smaller online venues. Nothing can be perfect because full disclosure 100% of the time is not realistic or possible.

 

If you created a new guide that was 30-50% below OSPG, people would be looking for discounts off that guide. To me, OSPG maintains a solid baseline that buyers and sellers can realistically utilze as the name implies (as "guide") and that it applies to a majority of comics books.

[MrBedrock]

A bunch of folks have mentioned that the OSPG needs to have a digital app. Here's the deal on that...

 

Any of you with the knowledge, ideas, ability, and money can do that for them. Geppi owns Gemstone, which owns the Overstreet Price Guide now. The Gemstone folks do not have the resources or ability to do an app and, as far as I'm aware, Geppi has no real intention of sinking his money into one at this time. They are more than willing to license the guide out to anyone who wants to build and market an app. The difficulty is in negotiating a fair price. They want quite a bit and there is an argument to be made that the potential marketability for any type of Overstreet based application would be very small.

[Bookery]

The people that despise the OPG are likely ones that collect a narrow range of comics... if you collect modern hot issues, or high-end CGC books, or even volatile keys, than no... OPG isn't for you.

 

Don't get me wrong... there are infuriating lapses in the OPG... why behind for so long on the value of many pre-code horror books, why still so high on 1950+ Disney comics?

 

I'm at home right now and don't even have an OPG handy, but off the top of my head, let's say I just acquired the following...

 

Challengers of the Unknown #15 (4.0), Archie #127 (5.0), Daffy Duck #6 (8.0), Marvel Mystery Comics #70 (2.0), Tarzan #9 (6.5), Adventures Into the Unknown #30 (6.0), Cheyenne #10 (8.5), Gorgo #5 (5.0), Classics Illustrated #8, 2nd ptg., (6.0), and the Super Comics reprint of Phantom Lady (3.0).

 

Now these 10 comics will take me a few minutes to look up in OPG, and with a little common sense, I will quickly ascertain an asking price for them. Or I could spend about 2 hours combing eBay, auction reports, and GPA, and likely still not find many of these issues in close enough grade to determine anything much about them.

 

I buy thousands of vintage comics per year... which method do you think I will use most often?

 

 

[Fan Boy]

A bunch of folks have mentioned that the OSPG needs to have a digital app. Here's the deal on that...

 

Any of you with the knowledge, ideas, ability, and money can do that for them. Geppi owns Gemstone, which owns the Overstreet Price Guide now. The Gemstone folks do not have the resources or ability to do an app and, as far as I'm aware, Geppi has no real intention of sinking his money into one at this time. They are more than willing to license the guide out to anyone who wants to build and market an app. The difficulty is in negotiating a fair price. They want quite a bit and there is an argument to be made that the potential marketability for any type of Overstreet based application would be very small.

 

These days, almost most people now have one or more apps on their phones, ipads or tablets and computers. That would be the next logical step for Geppi to look in. Didn`t Overstreet already have an online edition that we can order direct? This edition do have the data in there - it's a matter of software programming to tweak in building an app with this data linked in. Is it that hard to do?

[MrBedrock]

A bunch of folks have mentioned that the OSPG needs to have a digital app. Here's the deal on that...

 

Any of you with the knowledge, ideas, ability, and money can do that for them. Geppi owns Gemstone, which owns the Overstreet Price Guide now. The Gemstone folks do not have the resources or ability to do an app and, as far as I'm aware, Geppi has no real intention of sinking his money into one at this time. They are more than willing to license the guide out to anyone who wants to build and market an app. The difficulty is in negotiating a fair price. They want quite a bit and there is an argument to be made that the potential marketability for any type of Overstreet based application would be very small.

 

These days, almost most people now have one or more apps on their phones, ipads or tablets and computers. That would be the next logical step for Geppi to look in. Didn`t Overstreet already have an online edition that we can order direct? This edition do have the data in there - it's a matter of software programming to tweak in building an app with this data linked in. Is it that hard to do?

It shouldn't be, but that is assuming that the information is already in a usable database. That assumption would be incorrect.

[Dr. Balls]

A bunch of folks have mentioned that the OSPG needs to have a digital app. Here's the deal on that...

 

Any of you with the knowledge, ideas, ability, and money can do that for them. Geppi owns Gemstone, which owns the Overstreet Price Guide now. The Gemstone folks do not have the resources or ability to do an app and, as far as I'm aware, Geppi has no real intention of sinking his money into one at this time. They are more than willing to license the guide out to anyone who wants to build and market an app. The difficulty is in negotiating a fair price. They want quite a bit and there is an argument to be made that the potential marketability for any type of Overstreet based application would be very small.

 

These days, almost most people now have one or more apps on their phones, ipads or tablets and computers. That would be the next logical step for Geppi to look in. Didn`t Overstreet already have an online edition that we can order direct? This edition do have the data in there - it's a matter of software programming to tweak in building an app with this data linked in. Is it that hard to do?

It shouldn't be, but that is assuming that the information is already in a usable database. That assumption would be incorrect.

 

Custom-built pps are costly to build and require a lot of up front money - which he might be opposed to doing. I'm not an app expert, but we've quoted projects on apps and my cousin is an engineer who designs them - and they are expensive. That may be a big deterrent for them, and it might be hard to determine if they are going to get lots more users or just split the profits from book sales to app sales with twice the cost for development of both platforms (print and app).

 

Or, they could simply be scared that they will hamstring their print edition by putting out a digital version and putting themselves even further behind in technology.

 

 

[Tony S]

A bunch of folks have mentioned that the OSPG needs to have a digital app. Here's the deal on that...

 

Any of you with the knowledge, ideas, ability, and money can do that for them. Geppi owns Gemstone, which owns the Overstreet Price Guide now. The Gemstone folks do not have the resources or ability to do an app and, as far as I'm aware, Geppi has no real intention of sinking his money into one at this time. They are more than willing to license the guide out to anyone who wants to build and market an app. The difficulty is in negotiating a fair price. They want quite a bit and there is an argument to be made that the potential marketability for any type of Overstreet based application would be very small.

 

These days, almost most people now have one or more apps on their phones, ipads or tablets and computers. That would be the next logical step for Geppi to look in. Didn`t Overstreet already have an online edition that we can order direct? This edition do have the data in there - it's a matter of software programming to tweak in building an app with this data linked in. Is it that hard to do?

It shouldn't be, but that is assuming that the information is already in a usable database. That assumption would be incorrect.

 

I'm glad someone else posted this - because I've been told this is the key problem as well.

[Tony S]

the price guide is worthless.

 

+ 1,000

 

It makes me when people try to defend the OSPG by saying things like, "well, everyone knows that, for this segment of books, you have multiply Guide by 4x to get to the right price, and for this other segment of books, everyone knows that you have to take 30-50% off of Guide values..." I mean, here's a novel concept: just report the most accurate values possible so people don't have to apply arbitrary multipliers to adjust every inaccurate number in the Guide.

 

So without a baseline, how would you determine the value of a book? By taking in reports from Ebay? Paying someone to comb through sales of the CGC boards? GPA is doing that now, but is missing being able to account for private sales, convention sales and sales in smaller online venues. Nothing can be perfect because full disclosure 100% of the time is not realistic or possible.

 

If you created a new guide that was 30-50% below OSPG, people would be looking for discounts off that guide. To me, OSPG maintains a solid baseline that buyers and sellers can realistically utilze as the name implies (as "guide") and that it applies to a majority of comics books.

 

Another brilliant insight by the Dr.

[Jeffro.]

Did some posts in this thread vanish?

[Tony S]

Did some posts in this thread vanish?

 

I don't know. It was 7 pages last night and ten today, so it seems to be growing.

[Designer Toast]

Bob Overstreet is missing out on a very large revenue stream by not offering an updated version of the guide online.

 

Absolutely. Imagine a half-year addendum to the guide for $4.99 or less - I believe he'd do well with that concept, pay for his efforts and lock in some additional brand loyalty.

 

I think he'd do well with a decent subscription based website. He already has all the data, so just data populate the site and people who want to use it will have a mobile version available for their phone without a separate app (right?).

 

I also understand that the price for licensing OSPG is pretty over the top.