Sorry, I got confused and responded about the wrong “item”. This is the book thread.
Part of super high prices on books that shouldn’t cost THAT much is due, I believe, to apps that figure out the prices of books based on average prices asked by many sellers. Some sellers, when a book goes out of stock, will keep the book in their “catalog” of offerings, but set a ridiculously high price on it, so no one will actually order it as they do not currently have a copy to sell. The used-book apps then pick up on this and raise the average price of the book across the board. Other booksellers see a higher price, think they have found a gold mine, and offer their own copy of the book super-high, driving up the price of the book even further.
This resulted in, for example, a children’s book that I was looking for a couple years ago that reasonably should have cost between maybe 10 and 100 dollars depending on edition and condition, and was normally being sold for that amount, being offered on eBay for something like 300 dollars. I simply waited until I could find a copy being sold for 10 or 20 bucks and bought that one. Similarly, there is no reason to pay upwards of $300 for a TAN book paperback from 1995. I’m sure a copy of it will turn up for 20 dollars or under if I wait long enough, or I could just print out the free PDF from the web.