What do you call a thriving marketplace of robots buying nonexistent books from other robots for millions of dollars?

Apparently, Amazon.com.

The online retailer we know and mostly love can be something of a wild west, especially on the frontiers of its business. Consider the experience of Carlos Bueno, a software engineer at Facebook who, late last year, wrote and self-published a children’s book about computer science called Lauren Ipsum.

The book is inspired by Bueno’s self-education in programming as a young man and his belief that everyone in our increasingly computerized society should understand how to program.

“If someone could read, but they couldn’t write, in our society today, it would be kind of weird,” Bueno says. “But we totally accept the idea of someone who can use a computer but can’t program it. There are amazing things you can do when you don’t tell a child it’s too hard.”

Bueno raised money with Kickstarter to publish his book through Amazon’s self-publishing service, making his book available in a variety of electronic formats and also as a print-on-demand book—each time a physical copy is purchased, it’s printed specifically for that order. Bueno set the price of the book at $14.95 and has sold about 1,000 copies.

But in the last few weeks, Bueno has seen his book become the center of a strange phenomenon on Amazon: the bot market. A reseller in Amazon’s used books section was offering the book for $55—even though the book was available for forty dollars less on the same website.  Then another one appeared, selling for $14.94—lower than the retail price. Another was for sale for $12.50. The only way these resellers could profit would be through excessive shipping and handling charges. 

Even stranger, these resellers are offering “Very Good” or “Like New” used copies of a book that is printed on demand—that is, they’re offering used copies of books that probably don’t even exist.

If you haven’t guessed yet, these resellers aren’t people at all, but bots—software created by someone to try and game Amazon’s marketplace, making a profit by exploiting loopholes and engaging in bidding wars. But when they go wrong, they end up doing crazy things; a biologist at UC-Berkeley documented a bidding fight between two bots over a “classic work in developmental biology” called The Making of a Fly. By the time they were done, copies of the book were advertised for $2,198,177.95

“I’m a programmer, and I’m mystified,” Bueno says. “We’re just going to have to watch and see what these bots do now.”

What an amazingly interesting literacy world we live in!