The following table summarizes the top buyback sites during the months of December and January. Position is determined by the number of clicks to each site by BookScouter users, which is a good indicator of how competitive each site’s pricing is during this busy season.

Position                             December 2010                                              January 2011

      1                                    Amazon Buyback                                           Moola4Books

      2                                    TextbooksRus                                                 Amazon Buyback

      3                                    First Class Books                                           Better World Books

      4                                    Moola4Books                                                 Textbooks.com

      5                                    Better World Books                                       Cash4Books

      6                                    Textbooks.com                                              CKY Books

      7                                    Valore Books                                                  Powells Books

      8                                    CKY Books                                                      Book Jingle

      9                                    Cash4Books                                                   SellBackYourBook.com

      10                                  Powells Books                                               Valore Books

      11                                  SellBackYourBook.com                                First Class Books

      12                                  Chegg.com                                                     Book Byte

I get a couple dozen emails each week from people asking how much their books without an ISBN are worth. Unfortunately, the current  website is only useful for books with an ISBN. The ISBN obviously makes it easy to compare prices from multiple websites. I’m looking at ways to tackle this problem of finding the value of non-ISBN books. However, I don’t have any experience evaluating these types of books. I’d like to get in touch with a few book sellers who are knowledgeable about them and try to put something together. Please send me an email or use the Contact Form if you think that you can provide some insight.

The site had a bit of a jump in traffic over the last two days. I’ve had one email from somebody that noted learning about it on a television spot, so that seems to have been the cause. The extra traffic has caused a little bit of slowness on the site, but not anything too severe.
That is also the first mention of BookScouter on a television program that I’m aware of, so I’d be interested if anybody could provide any details, including what channel and market it was in, or a way to view it online.

I was recently interviewed by Kristian Storm for an article on BookThink.com. Kristian runs lowestcostbooks.com and has been reselling books for many years. His article is intended for book sellers who deal primarily with higher-end collectible books, so he recommends using BookScouter to sell some slow-moving books. The article includes a good review of some of the top vendors that he recommends using as well.
The full article is available at http://bookthink.com/0152/152amaz1.htm

I’ve just finished adding FairBooks.com to the site so that their prices will show up for searches. BookScouter now compares prices from 44 different buyback vendors.

We are excited to announce the new Bookscouter Android app. To get started you need to go to the Android Market, search Bookscouter, and download the app for FREE. When opening the Bookscouter app the first time you will be prompted to download a barcode scanner. The app uses your phone’s digital camera to scan the barcodes so the scanner is a must. When using the app you can either scan the ISBN or type it into the search bar. Let us know how it’s working!