CliffsNotes Buying and Selling on eBay

eBay has grown in three years from a simple Web site designed for trading PEZ dispensers to a multi-million user online auction service with a market value of $6 billion. CliffsNotes' Buying & Selling on eBay provides a road map to this popular online service. This book takes a new user by the hand and walks them through how to use this magnificent buying and selling site. Author Greg Holden, has made a business out of his eBay transactions. He has packed the book with information on bidding, research, fraud, and more!

• CliffsNotes' Buying & Selling on eBay takes readers step-by-step through transactions using this popular online auction service.
• Make savvy bids using the book's buying tips and tricks.
• Complaints of fraud have tarnished the reputation of auction sites, including eBay. CliffsNotes' Buying & Selling on eBay offers tips to help protect you against fraud.

Greg Holden is founder and president of a small business called Stylus Media, which is a group of editorial, design, and computer professionals who produce both print and electronic publications. The company gets its name from a recording stylus, that reads the traces left on a disk by voices or instruments and translates those signals into electronic data that can be amplified and enjoyed by many.

One of the ways Greg enjoys communicating is through explaining technical subjects in nontechnical language by writing computer books, which help other people use the Web to share their own personal and professional interests. Starting an Online Business For Dummies® is his ninth book. Recently, Greg also coordinated a chat event on the Internet, prepared content for a CD-ROM tutorial that shows small business owners how to create their own Web sites, and helped produce technical manuals on Java and Lotus Notes.

Greg balances his technical expertise and his entrepreneurial experience with his love of literature. He received a M.A. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, but that only gave him an official credential for what he had been doing since he was a tiny tot. As a preschooler, barely big enough to hold the book, he was displayed by his proud but rather puzzled parents as the kid who read from the encyclopedia to impress his relatives at family gatherings. You can read about some of his past and present triumphs and traumas in the poetry and short stories that he scribbles down at odd moments.

After graduating from college, Greg became a reporter for his hometown newspaper, first covering sewers and school boards and then working his way up to having his own column (called "So It Goes"), in which he voiced his perspective on the world. Working at the publications office at the University of Chicago was his next job, and it was there that he started to use computers. He discovered, as the technology became available, that he loved desktop publishing (with the Macintosh and LaserWriter and, later on, the World Wide Web).

Greg loves to travel, but since his two daughters were born, he hasn't been able to get around much. However, through the Web, he enjoys traveling vicariously and meeting people online. He lives with his family in an old house in Chicago that he has been rehabbing for -- well, for many years now. He is a collector of objects such as pens, cameras, radios, and hats. He is always looking for things to take apart so that he can see how they work and fix them up. Many of the same skills prove useful in creating and maintaining Web pages. Greg is an active member of Jewel Heart, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation and study group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.