The Lemon Fool

What are the best ways of selling books these days? I have books which I bought for some post-graduate study that I no longer need. They are not text books as such, but most are quite academic.

I bought some new and others second hand via online book-sellers.

Many thanks
C

Never tried it myself but Amazon will sell stuff for private individuals and i have bought many second hand books through their site.

colin wrote:Never tried it myself but Amazon will sell stuff for private individuals and i have bought many second hand books through their site.

I didn't know individuals could still sell privately via Amazon. I bought most of my second hand books via Amazon from marketplace sellers but they were all large organisations (I presumed!)

They offer a sell single items service for 75P + other non specified charges, I assume you have to put your item through the system to find out how much it will cost. Otherwise Ebay or Gumtree?

I've just been reading the excellent `Diary of a Bookseller' - https://profilebooks.com/the-diary-of-a-bookseller.html

The author owns a bookshop in the small Scottish town of Wigtown. He buys a lot of his stock from members of the public who either just turn up with some boxes of books or, for a large collection, invite him to their house.

As I detest Amazon for what they have done to bookshops (though like most of us hypocritically buy books from them on a regular basis) I'd advise contacting local second-hand bookshops, assuming there are any left in your area. You may be pleasantly surprised.

I just sold a load of books to www.webuybooks.co.uk, including some MBA text books. Might be worth a try. Download their app for the scanner, which makes the whole process very easy.

MM

If your books are specialist texts, then you might like to see who's selling them and what they are fetching. A search on Amazon and eBay may give you a starting reference. Mrs VRD tends to use Abebooks (www.abebooks.co.uk) and has contacted sellers to see if they would like to buy her copy of what they are selling.

Local booksellers may not be as interested as you would hope - they are under tremendous pressure from the internet channels and unless they are very specialist or hobby-run may struggle to justify the ROI on a slow-moving volume.

If the post-grad study has an on-line presence, have you thought of advertising them there to the current students? (Forum or via one of the staff?)

VRD

alibris.co.uk can be good for this, but they do charge $20/year so only worth it if you have a few books to sell.

One word of warning is that when I used them a few years ago I got a mountain of spam from various booksellers, so I would definitely use a throwaway email account.

Academic books tend to sell at the start of term, so I think a long term 'buy it now' listing at a competitive price will work better than an auction.

Thanks everyone. I ended up using 2 different online bookbuyers. Here are my comments on each ...

https://www.webuybooks.co.uk/
https://www.musicmagpie.co.uk/

What books do they buy?
Both refused to buy some books - especially ones that were hugely popular in recent years. Presumably there are so many of them around for sale. This even included the hardback version of Dawkins God Delusion and other books by well-known scientific writers. Humorous Christmas stocking filler books were not of interest or I was offered pennies. Webuybooks (Revival Books) had a greater interest in specialist books. Musicmagpie was prepared to buy more.

Website ease of use
Both websites were easy to use. Webuybooks was easier in that it let you enter either a barcode or ISBN whereas musicmagpie only worked with barcodes. So it was trickier to get older books recognised by musicmagpie. Handily, webuybooks seemed to convert the ISBN into a barcode format which I copied and pasted into musicmagpie

Who Pays the Most
Much to my surprise musicmagpie paid a fair bit more for most of the books. That surprised me because I thought a specialist book buyer would be better. Webuybooks tended to pay more for specialist books that might no longer be in print. That said, the most I received for any book was about £8.50. Musicmagpie offered me £5 for the same book.

Sending off the books
Both pretty good here. They each issue a paid-for label which you print off and attach to your box (you can pack your books in pretty much any box). Both offer Hermes as either pick-up from your house or drop-off at a collection point. One of them gave another courier option but I've forgotten which one . I dropped all mine off at a local Co-op Hermes collection point.

Efficiency
Musicmagpie acknowledged receipt and checked out my items a day or two ahead of webuybooks, based on me sending 1 package to the former and 2 to the latter. They also paid more quickly.

So I would recommend both sites. You're not going to make a fortune, but I've shipped over £100 worth of books (income to me) in the last week. I would recommend entering details into both websites because it might surprised you who pays the most for any given book.

Clariman

Thanks for that review Clariman, potentially very useful.

vrdiver wrote:If the post-grad study has an on-line presence, have you thought of advertising them there to the current students? (Forum or via one of the staff?)
VRD

Just to respond to this ... The University has a second hand bookshop but they were not interested in the books from one of my classes. To be fair it was a topic of limited interest and there were only about 12 in that particular class. I also emailed the Prof who ran the class, but he said it wasn't being offered this year so no route that way either.

In response to other people's suggestions, I am sure that I could have got more money by selling individual books through other routes e.g. EBay, Amazon, Abebooks etc., but I wanted a pretty efficient mechanism of getting shot of them. It was part of a MUCH bigger clear-out which also included the Clariman Computer Museum (i.e. old laptops etc), old furniture and loads of other stuff. I needed to clear some space before some work being done on the house.

Thanks
C

I sell mine on Depop. But Depop's more popular for clothing but you can sell a book there. It's a phone app, by the way.