At least one person per day asks how to sell their old or rare books. For these, Bookscouter.com is not able to provide vendors since there is no ISBN number associated with them. However we do provide alternate sources to find your books highest rated value.
I’ve just finished adding Amazon.com’s Textbook Trade-in prices to the site. The service is pretty new, and I’ve not heard much feedback about it yet. Beware that they offer payment ONLY through Amazon.com gift cards. My understanding is that they pay credit directly to your account, so I don’t know if there is any way to sell the gift card and convert it to cash. I believe that the buyback program is actually run by a third-party and not by Amazon directly.
From what I have seen, the service has been offering pretty competitive prices on some books recently. I’ve actually seen cases where they were buying books back for more than double the lowest marketplace price, so I think that they are still figuring out how to calculate their prices. I think they have some of the obvious problems worked out, but hopefully their new buyback program will be a good avenue to make some more money for those used books.
With the addition of Amazon, that brings the total number of vendors searchable on BookScouter to 40, making it the most comprehensive site of its kind.
What is it for, and where did it come from?
W. H. Smith, who was the largest single book retailer in Great Britain, became computerized and wanted a standard numbering system for all the books it carried. They constructed the Standard Book Numbering system (SBN), which was introduced in 1967. In 1970 the ISO, International Organization for Standardization, which consisted of several countries, adopted this standard system. It evolved into the ISBN numbering system and is now the standard in approximately 150 countries.
Books that were published prior to 1970 do not have ISBN numbers. These books may be rare and antique. But, just because they are labeled this way does not mean that they are valuable. The most basic of our economic terms, supply and demand, help us dictate the value of such books. A book found in abundance with little desirability to collectors will normally be worth less than a book that is scarce and in high demand. The demand for less common and more desirable books drives the price up. If you are looking to sell your rare or antique books then look to Abebooks.com or Powellsbooks.com. These are both great places to sell or just price the books. If you think that the books may be of more value than these sites give you, then you can try finding an ABBA (Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association of America) near you.
One of our BookScouter Pro Tools is a Historic Buyback Price tool that allows you to analyze past book prices. This tool can be used to understand pricing trends for a given book or collection of books. It can assist you in determining the best time to sell your books. Here are a few examples:
Hopefully this quick introduction has given you some insight into the power of the Historic Buyback Price tool. It should allow you to maximize your selling prices and help you earn more money. If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to comment!
This is probably the busiest week of the year for this site. BookScouter traffic has more than tripled since last year at this time. Last week I added an extra server to give the site some more capacity. I’m happy that all of the servers have been performing well! The problem now is all of the websites whose prices this site is searching are also getting stressed. It is their busiest time of the year as well, and some of them aren’t handling the added volume as well as others. That means that sometimes when BookScouter tries to look up prices on their sites, it goes really slowly. That in-turn causes prices to show up slower on BookScouter. I’ve tried to account for slow sites, and in general it does a good job, but I’m occasionally seeing issues where it still goes slowly. I’m investigating those more closely to see if I can prevent the cases that are still getting through.
I’ve also been working on tweaking some server-related settings to try and optimize things as much as possible. I’m keeping a pretty close eye on things and continually trying to make sure that the site is performing well for everybody.
As always, please Contact us if you would like to let us know how how the site is working for you.
Online book rental companies are a new alternative for college students in need of textbooks. So the question is, “Is it better to buy or rent?” It depends on each individual’s situation and preference. If you’re the type of person that buys your book at full price and never gets around to selling it, then renting textbooks is definitely for you. But, if you shop around for the best deal, when purchasing a book and then use a site like Bookscouter to sell it back, then buying textbooks is the way to go.
Let’s do a case study, I’m going to pretend that I have to buy Molecular Cell Biology (9780716776017), which retails at $131.67. First I am going to find the lowest price I can rent it for at Textbookrenter. Then I am going to see how much I can buy it for at Campusbooks. After that, I am going find out how much I can sell it for here at Bookscouter. The new historic buyback feature can show you that the price of that book has slowly gone down over time, but today (April 29th) it seems to have jumped back up a bit.
The lowest rental price was $42.21 from Campusbookrentals.com. The lowest buying price was $57.49 from Amazon.com. The highest selling price was $47.12 from Firstclassbooks.com. So if I rented the book it would have cost me a total of $42.21. If I bought the book and sold it, it would cost me a total of $10.37.
The benefit of renting is that you don’t have to worry if all of the sudden the author comes out with a new edition and your book becomes unwanted. Renting also is usually more convenient then buying and selling because it saves time. At the end of the day, if you’re willing to buy and sell your books, you will usually end up with a few more dollars in your pockets then if you rented.