How Bots Seized Con­trol of My Pric­ing Strategy

Be­fore I talk about my own troub­les, let me tell you about an­oth­er book, “Com­put­er Game Bot Tur­ing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “writt­en” by a Mar­kov chain runn­ing over ran­dom Wikipedia ar­ticles, bundled up and sold on­line for a ridicul­ous price. The pub­lish­er, Bet­ascript, is notori­ous for this kind of thing.
A story about com­put­er sci­ence
and other im­prob­able th­ings.

It gets bet­t­er. There are whole spe­cies of other bots that in­fest the Amazon Mar­ketplace, pre­tend­ing to have used co­p­ies of books, fight­ing epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Tur­ing Test” we have a de­light­ful futuris­tic ab­surd­ity: a com­put­er pro­gram, pre­tend­ing to be human, hawk­ing a book about com­put­ers pre­tend­ing to be human, while other com­put­er pro­grams pre­tend to have used co­p­ies of it. A book that was never ac­tual­ly writt­en, much less prin­ted and read.

The in­ter­net has every­th­ing.

This would just be an in­terest­ing an­ec­dote, ex­cept that bot ac­tiv­ity also seems to af­fect books that, you know, ac­tual­ly exist. Last year I pub­lished my children's book about com­put­er sci­ence, Laur­en Ipsum. I set a price of $14.95 for the paper­back edi­tion and sales have been pre­tty good. Then last week I noticed a mar­ketplace bot of­fer­ing to sell it for $55.63. “Silly bots”, I thought to myself, “must be a bug”. After all, it's print-on-demand, so where would you get a new copy to sell?

Then it oc­cured to me that all they have to do is buy a copy from Amazon, if an­yone is ever foolish en­ough to buy from them, and reap a pro­fit. Lazy evalua­tion, made flesh. Clev­er bots!

Then an­oth­er bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They star­ted com­pet­ing with each other on price. Pre­tty soon they were of­fer­ing my book below the re­tail price, and try­ing to make up the dif­fer­ence on “shipp­ing and han­dl­ing". I was gett­ing a bit wor­ried.

The punchline is that Amazon it­self is a bot that does price-matching. Soon after the mar­ketplace bot's race to the bot­tom, it de­cided to put my book on sale! 28% off. I can't wait to find out what that does to my mar­gin. (Up­date: noth­ing, it turns out. Amazon is eat­ing the en­tire dis­count. This is a pleasant sur­pr­ise.)

My rea­c­tion to this al­gorithmic whip­saw­ing has settled down to a kind of helpless be­muse­ment. I mean, the plot of my book is about how un­derstand­ing com­put­ers is the first step to tak­ing con­trol of your life in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Now I don't know what to be­lieve.

It's pos­sible that the opt­im­al price of Laur­en Ipsum is, in fact, ten dol­lars and seventy-six cents and I should just relax and trust the tat­tooed hipst­er who wrote Amazon's pric­ing al­gorithm. After all, I no long­er have a choice. The price is now de­ter­mined by the com­plex in­terac­tion of sever­al in­depen­dent com­put­er pro­grams, most of which don't ac­tual­ly have a copy to sell.

But I can't help but think about that old gambler's pro­verb: “If you can't spot the suc­k­er, it's you.”

Up­date, 29 Feb: The Good­will In­dust­ries of Great­er Neb­raska has jum­ped into the ring, of­fer­ing a used copy of Ipsum for $12.18. I be­lieve this one. It men­tions that their copy is sig­ned by both me and the il­lustrator. We sold about 250 sig­ned co­p­ies dur­ing our Kickstart­er cam­paign, and 2 or 3 went to Neb­raska.

Trans­la­tions: Heb­rew, Japanese

Like what you read? Laur­en Ipsum is a children's story about com­put­er sci­ence. Buy a copy, and you'll be help­ing us trans­late it into Spanish, Por­tuguese, and other lan­guages.