The past couple of weeks have started the winter buyback season for textbooks.

There are three main spikes in the year for buying back textbooks. First, the entire month of May as the Spring semester ends for most students. It actually starts the last week of April and goes through the first week of June.

The next, smaller peak occurs as the summer semester ends and fall begins. It lasts from about the last week of July, the entire month of August, and the first couple weeks of September.

Finally, the last peak of the largest, and longest peak of the year occurs as fall semester ends. It starts the day after Thanksgiving, and hits the largest peak the second week of December when many schools have their finals. It takes a big dip the week of Christmas, picks back up after New Years, and stays strong throughout most the month of January.

These peaks match up pretty nicely to the excellent article on Extrabux regarding the best time to buy and sell your textbooks.

We’ve just added the ability to log in to BookScouter with your Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts. This makes it much easier to register and log into the site with just a couple of clicks. If you are logged in via a social network, you can also easily share the site with your friends or followers to let them know how to get the best prices for their used books.

As with anything on the site, we welcome feedback regarding these new features. Feel free to post comments here or email us using the Contact Us form.

There has been a lot of confusion in the past month, and specifically the past week about changes that are taking place with Amazon’s various API’s. This post is intended to clarify what has happened with Amazon Book API and explain where things currently stand.

I’ve had several people contact me with concerns about the changes that are taking place with Amazon’s Product Advertising API‘s at the end of August. According to the notices that I’ve read, seller’s access to the Product Advertising API will be discontinued as of August 31st. Sellers are to migrate to the MWS Products API by then.

BookScouter was mentioned today on the MSN Money Personal Finance Site. The BookScouter mention was on tip 5 and related to decluttering your home and selling your used books back online. Welcome to you new visitors! We hope that you’re able to reduce some clutter around your home and make some money while doing so.

We’ve just finished making some changes to the Preferred merchants listed on the site. With the number of buyback sites growing every month, we introduced the Preferred Vendor concept two years ago, and it has worked out really well. It makes the site faster for everybody, and it sends more users to those sites that can handle the higher volume and consistently have good user ratings. They also provide BookScouter a commission so that the site can continue to be used by anyone for free.

Preferred vendors on the site receive about 10x more requests than the others. As such, there are a lot of companies that would like to obtain that designation. Ultimately this also helps you, as a user on the site. One of the requirements to become a preferred vendor include keeping an excellent feedback rating, which means that companies should work with you to resolve any issues to avoid receiving negative feedback.

With these recent changes we’ve added a few new preferred vendors who have demonstrated that they can provide an excellent customer experience and handle the increased order volume. We’ve also removed a couple of vendors who didn’t meet our requirements or who weren’t interested in featuring the buyback side of their business. I feel like we have a really good mix of companies now, many of which specialize in different areas, so that we can display the best prices by default.

As always, if you’d like to customize the list of vendors that show up by default, you can sign up for a free account and select the vendors that you’d like to see every time.