I just learned that BookScouter has been mentioned in the March 2011 issue of Consumer Report Magazine. The full article is titled “How To Get Rid of Practically Anything”! There are a few paragraphs about getting rid of old books where it mentions that BookScouter compares prices from dozens of book-buying sites.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Borders Bookstores has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is closing around 200 of its 600+ stores across the country. The stores that are closing will be liquidating their inventory which means that some good deals can be found. You can check this link for a list of Borders Store Closings to find one near you.

Due to some recent feedback from vendors on BookScouter’s feedback system, I’ve recently made a couple of minor modifications to the feedback page and the criteria that I use to approve feedback. When a user is submitting feedback, the following text is now displayed at the bottom of the page:

“Each feedback submitted is manually reviewed and approved before being displayed on the site. Ultimately, BookScouter may approve or reject feedback for any reason. We try to be as fair as possible and may not approve feedback for some of the reasons noted below.”

• Vulgar or offensive language, including name-calling.
• Poor grammer, punctation, spelling, or the use of all caps.
• Comments not specificly related to the vendor for which it was submitted.
• Comments not related to selling back books.
• If we have reason to believe that a vendor is incentivising users to leave positive feedback for themselves or negative feedback for somebody else.
• Only one comment per user, per vendor is allowed. The most recent feedback will be displayed.

I also fancied up the page a little bit by adding a clickable-star selection instead of a drop-down box with numbers.

Finally, when submitting negative feedback for a Preferred vendor, users have the option of using me to contact the vendor on their behalf and try to have their complaint resolved directly. These are vendors that I believe provide good customer service, and I will try to work with my contacts at these companies to ensure that BookScouter users have the positive experience that I expect.

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.