This is an open letter to Magic Hector of Colorado, and KaiTech of Missouri. I am writing to ask: exactly what is your business model?

I ask only because I note that you’re selling used copies of my book for one cent on Amazon.com.

This presents me with just a whole series of questions.

First, may I ask you just what your wholesale price was? Did you pay it with ha’pennies? Hungarian forints? Indonesian rupiahs? Saddam-era Iraqi dinar?

My theory is that you found my book in a rain-soaked ditch somewhere, or it was stolen off of a Reading Is Fundamental truck and made its way to you.

Second, I’m assuming that some portion of the purchase price must be paid to Amazon for brokering the transaction. How do you accomplish this? Speaking as an Internet consultant, do you realize how much money you can make by solving the problem of micropayments? You’ve blown right past this and gone straight into nanopayments.

Seriously, stop selling my book and call me. There are some crazy people out there that would pay whole dollars for this.

Third, I’m curious to know just how you arrived at that purchase price. Did you look over the contents and say, “Yeah, this is about worth an amount of money I wouldn’t bend over to pick up”? Did it collect dust on a shelf when you priced it at a nickel? Are you unable to count higher than one, and trying to avoid embarrassment?

I checked the weight of the book, and today’s spot markets for the price of recycled high-quality bulk white paper. You seem to believe that the addition of 70,649 carefully crafted, laboriously chosen words actually reduces the worth of the raw materials by 60%, even before considering the valuable binding glue and laminate.

Surely you live within walking distance of a landfill? Or a high-school Greenpeace volunteer with some spare change?

Finally, I just need to know, is this really the best way you have available to you to make money? The book is subtitled “Making Money While Keeping Your Freedom”, after all, so I feel qualified to comment on this. I’m considering the time it will take you to make that precious penny.

You had to list the book on Amazon. What exactly were you thinking at the moment you typed “$0.01” into the pricing web form? Were you drunk?

You must be working on huge volume, and you clearly can’t afford warehouses. So you have to retrieve the book from your shelving in the cave network of northern Pakistan, or some other very large godforsaken hole.

Then you have to package the book, slap on the stamps, print out the buyer’s address, and drop it in the mail. Not difficult, but time-consuming, especially since you’ve probably been on a very low-protein diet recently.

Maybe I’ll be that buyer. I don’t know anywhere else I can get a bubble-wrap envelope at that price.

For the sake of argument, let’s presume that your penny is pure, unadulterated profit. It’ll probably take you about 60-90 minutes of your time to make the sale. So we’re basically not measuring your value in dollars per hour, but in hours per dollar. More like workweeks per dollar. You could earn much more by learning Bengali and becoming a migrant Bangladeshi day laborer. Those guys average almost $35 a week.

On the bright side, if you do decide to stay in the US, and you’re single with no children, you can work for 829,425 hours this year and still qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. And I truly hope you’re single with no children, for many, many reasons.

I’d like to thank you for your efforts to move my work as quickly as possible. It clearly was not meant to stay in your hands, as it was written for people with a functional prefrontal cortex. In gratitude, I’ll leave you with some advice as an expert on entrepreneurship.

Get a job.

Best regards,
Jeff Porten