How To

Evaluating a stack

Evaluate a Stack is for books you do not own yet. Someone sets a pile in front of you: a back-issue bin, the far side of your own table, a seller's kitchen counter. You want to know what the pile is and what it is worth before any money moves, and you want to find out without promising anything.

Scan the pile

Open Evaluate a Stack and photograph the books, one per cover, while the conversation carries on. The app identifies each book and the list fills itself in. Two answers arrive for every book. First, whether you already own it, printings and conditions distinguished: that lookup is your own inventory answering, so it lands instantly and costs nothing. Second, what the market says, priced as a batch when you ask for it: Auto ballpark prices each book as it is identified, or the Ballpark button prices the finished stack in one pass for less. Until you buy, the books stay in their own holding area, never mixed into your collection or its searches.

Buy them, or walk away

The evaluation ends in one step either way. Shake hands and it is easy to buy them: one action brings the whole stack into your inventory, photographed, identified, and priced from the moment it became yours. Or pass, and throw the evaluation away: nothing is recorded, and their books were never yours to clean up after.

Not the same as Scan a Stack

The names are close; the jobs are not. Scan a Stack reads the barcode labels on books you already own: a local answer, no AI involved, always free. Evaluate a Stack identifies strangers from their covers, which is AI work, so it spends credits like any other identification. That is worth remembering at a long bin: flip past the books you can dismiss on sight and spend credits only on the ones still in the running. The credits guide has the arithmetic.

Evaluate a Stack mid-session: a Silver Surfer book under the camera, a running Mine total of $22, rows reading You own 1, VF $6, and a Ballpark 3 books button. — The ownership match answers first: “Mine $22” before a single credit is spent on pricing.

See it in real life: a dealer prices a stack across the table in The other side of the table, a maybe-deal stays a maybe in No deal in sight, a bin gets triaged in The back-issue bin, and a whole garage lands on a desk in The phone call.