I previously posted here about selling your stuff on Amazon. When I want to sell books, I usually start with Amazon. But often the Amazon market is flooded with used books, so the price you can get isn’t very good. When that happens, I either donate the book or look for another avenue to sell it. There are several used book stores online, including: Powell’s, AbeBooks, and Cash4Books.
I have a bookcase full of books that have primarily come from PaperbackSwap over the years. Since getting these books, I’ve really started to prefer reading books on my phone. I didn’t think that would be my device of choice since the screen is pretty small. But I love that it’s always with me. If I get stuck in line for 20 minutes at the post office. I can pull out my “book” and read. I also like that it is backlit. I can get in bed, turn off the light and start reading. But I digress… because I prefer to read on my phone, I’ve been periodically checking the library to see if they have the books I own in digital format. If they do, I’ve been putting those books in a stack to sell. My stack was getting pretty big and the prices to sell via Amazon were not very good.
Since some of the books I wanted to sell were classics and some were design books, I also tried Amazon’s Textbooks page. You can enter all the ISBN numbers and Amazon will give you a price that they will pay. I have found that usually, if they are willing to offer you a decent price, you can get a better price by selling it on Amazon yourself. But if you don’t want to mess with individual sales, including shipping books individually, this is an option to consider. Amazon’s offer for this set of books was $0.60 for two books. So I tried the other three sites mentioned above. Powell’s offer was the best by far. I have used them in the past; in my experience Powell’s offer is usually the best. This may have something to do with the type of books I own; I’m sure it’s possible different sites prefer different types of books. Powell’s offered me around $19 in credit at their store or $13 sent to my Paypal account. Since my goal for all of this is to get rid of books, I opted for the cash payment.
The best thing about using a service like this is that you can box all of the books in once box and the store you’re selling them to will give you a prepaid label to ship them. You don’t receive payment until the books are received and the store accepts the quality. They will then send payment. A few of the books I sent were pretty old, which I believe they should know from the ISBN number. Because they’re old the pages are yellow. I’ll let you know if they dock my payment because of that. So far, I’ve always received the offered price. My next step for the rest of the books is to try a couple of used books stores near my part-time job. Hopefully one of them will take some more of them off my hands.
