I’ve just finished adding two new vendors to the site, bringing to total number of searchable sites up to 43. Moola4Books is a company based out of Fort Wayne, Indiana that has been buying and selling books since 2008. The initial pricing that I’ve see looks like these guys have pretty competitive pricing.

Buyback101.com is based out of Florida and specializes in K-12 books, so they may buy some of those books in quantities that other textbook companies won’t.

I’ve had a good amount of communication with both companies prior to getting them enabled today. Both seem very eager to provide excellent customer service and to provide accurate and prompt payments. I’d encourage you to give them a try when you see the opportunity. And please remember to leave feedback once you have completed a transaction or two.

BookScouter offers its users multiple Pro Tools to level up their experience (and revenues) when selling and buying textbooks.

It seems that students across the country are complaining about the rising cost of textbooks. However, we believe that students who buy and sell their books online can pay less for their books than ever before. There is more and more competition with companies who want to buy those used books. The competition is so fierce, in fact, that you can often sell a book back for almost as much as you paid for it. We’d like to gather some data from real students who are currently in college. If you are a student, or know a student, please submit the following:

College:

Major:

Year:

ISBNs from your required textbooks:

We’re then going to go through all of the submitted data and try to calculate how much students are paying for books, and how much they could save if they bought and sold them online.

Feel free to submit responses to this thread, or to email them to us at students@bookscouter.com

The following sites were the most popular in May and June 2010 according to the number of visitors sent from BookScouter. This is a good indication of which websites offered the highest prices during the month.

1. Textbooksrus.com
2. Powells Books
3. Amazon Buyback
4. FirstClassBooks.com
5. Textbooks.com
6. Sellbackyourbook.com
7. Cash4books.com
8. BookByte.com
9. CKYbooks
10. Better World Books

I had previously been running the mobile site and the iPhone application off of an older server. That server had some problems yesterday and the mobile site was down for some period of time until I got that fixed this morning. I have had plans to move those pieces over to the newer servers, but the problems from yesterday gave it the urgency needed to get that done. The good news is that the mobile site and iPhone apps now use the same infrastructure as the main websites which is more scalable and reliable. Additionally, some of the newer vendors which weren’t available on those platforms are now available as well.
I apologize for the inconvenience caused by those being inaccessible, but they should be working well now along with some other fixes that have been planned as well.

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.