I have been doing a lot of reading and a bit of buying on eBay of animal parts and pieces. In keeping with my French-Canadian ancestry, I have begun trading in animal pelts, along with other objects like horns, skulls, etc. It’s been a pretty interesting learning experience. And I have to say that I really like using eBay as a way to learn about specialized fields of knowledge.

Some of the things you quickly find using eBay:

1. Multiple names for the same type of objects
2. Simple historical information about an object class, along with its uses and information which distinguishes one object from another in its class.
3. Relative values of objects: aesthetic and practical differences which inflate or deflate the value of an object - along with a notion over time of what a particular type of object is typically “worth” on the market.

Those three things coupled with some really basic Wikipedia and Google searches can yield a wealth of information which you’d never receive without having actual tradable objects as a focal point. Then, of course, there is the excitement of the actual object you finally purchase showing up at your house - which is a pleasure neither Wikipedia or Google can offer at this point. Once you have an object which you’ve researched extensively and won at a good value, you tend to have a lot better grasp of the subject matter at hand in an immediate and direct way. Not to mention that density of information tends to be a great deal higher as encoded into an actual physical object than an article on a website. Few people talk about such things in this age of web searches, but eBay has a definite edge here because of that. And I don’t even mind paying the usage fees for eBay as a result, when I begin to think of it as an information source, instead of just a place to buy shit.