Book on Amazon tops $23.6 million

BERKELEY, Calif., April 26 (UPI) -- A California biologist said computer algorithms are to blame for the price of a book about flies on Amazon.com exceeding $23.6 million.

Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California-Berkeley, said he initially noticed two copies of "The Making of a Fly" by Peter Lawrence listed for $1.7 million on the Web site and he watched for several days as the prices rose to a high of $23,698,655.93, MSNBC.com reported Tuesday.

Eisen said he determined the sellers of the books, bordeebook and profnath, were using computer algorithms to alter their prices in relation to those of the competitor. He said profnath's price would be set once a day to 0.9983 times bordeebook's price and bordeebook would follow a few hours later by adjusting the price to 1.270589 times profnath's higher price.

The biologist said he recently checked and found profnath's price had fallen to $106.23 and bordeebook's price had been lowered to $134.97. He said it is likely an Amazon worker spotted the prices and manually corrected them.