Business Thursday: Skillbooks

The skillbook market is probably the one that most trader started their career. The reason for that is skillbooks are widely needed and not replaceable. Practically every pilot will buy the Gunnery skillbook.

If everyone does it, isn't it full? No, because we move on. Skillbooks don't provide stellar profit and pretty laborious. I'd rather consider it hauling than real trading, but exactly because of that, very young newbies can start it. All you need is a frigate with inertia stabilizers and 20-30M capital. Based on availability, there are several kinds of skillbooks:

• Unlimited: these ones are the worst, every school station has hundreds of it. While you can haul them to a hub, usually the margin is pitiful. It's a business for large capital, low time traders who get thousands of it at once and sell them for below 1% profit.
• Limited stock: my dear Logistics skillbook, the one that I collected in my youth. These books are sold by a small number and if you buy them out, the next batch will be expensive. So you can't buy a billion worth of it, you have to hop around in stations and buy a few at once. Sometimes you have to go to other regions for it. It's practically running courier missions, except for the much higher profit.
• Region specific: Amarr Dreadnought skillbook can only be purchased in Amarr space. There are lot of others like that too. So you stock up and go to the hub of the other races and sell.
• LP store/drop: Nanite Control and co. You need to set up both buy and sell orders for them, station trading them normally.
• Newbie: these are given out as mission rewards in the newbie systems. These aren't expensive but you can have large profit % on them, duplicating your little capital fast. Of course this market is limited by the number of newbies. You set up buy orders in school systems and haul them to hubs.

Skillbooks don't seem much, but they are a good entry to anyone starting his trading career. Don't ignore them!