Tome prices: why are TOJs in such high demand?

[Vanadin]

Right now, TOJs are selling for about 1000-1200 gold, and are in fairly high demand: if I price tomes just 1 gold below the listed asking price, they typically sell within a matter of seconds.

Last I checked TOJs were about 3 times higher than even Tomes of Secrets. . . . why is that? Do you expect it to change rapidly in the near future?

[Moik]

I don't know why the price difference is so severe but...
Gems can still have a tiny bit of profitability, and the cost to craft Squares into Flawless Squares at the start of the long slog to Star+ can be a bit cheaper than buying Flawless Squares as the seed/starter tier... though not at these prices...
Similarly, more "professionals" are farming Inferno than they are Hell. They end up with a large stock of TOSs to sell. There isn't really anyone farming Hell to stock TOJs and meet demand.

Gemcrafters are creating demand.
There are no farmers to handle the demand.
Price goes up.
(Though, seriously, I'm sure the TOJ price kills Gemcrafter profitability if they are upgrading squares. This doesn't feel like an accurate answer to me.)

[Archon_Wing]

They only drop in hell and most people would rather try to farm inferno than hell. Basically, they're outsourcing the annoyance of collection to other people.

However, in my case I just ignore anything that's not a flawless square. It's too much of a hassle.

[LimaWhiskey]

It seems that right after 1.0.3 a lot of people started combining gems and buying ToJs.
Not realizing that cheaper would be to buy flawless square gems.
I sold my ToJs (on EU) for around 1400 each and flawless squares were priced 180-320 at that time...
Pages of jewelcrafting seem to be in demand too (100-120 gold) when corresponding gems are 20-30 gold.

[galzohar]

Either people are just stupid and upgrade gems when they can get the upgraded gem cheaper (which may have been happening even before 1.0.3), or a significant portion is leveling through exploits of some sort and thus don't get enough tomes to level their jewelcrafter by simply playing (or the drop rates have been reduced so that you don't get enough by normal leveling, but I doubt that's the case).

Then again, all the above explanations are rather odd, so I'll be happy to hear of a better one