Selling Books Online – Find the Best Price
I love selling books online (basic process, maximize cash, buy cheap books). In fact, my wife just prepared three boxes of books to send off for over $200. Cash!
Selling books online is easy
Yep, it’s really a piece of cake. My favorite book buyback site is BookByte. Just enter your ISBN’s, print a mailing label, and ship your books. It takes a little while to get your check, but it will come!
BookScouter makes selling books EASIER
If you want to sell your books for the best price possible, check out BookScouter. This is a new service that can be a great tool for book sellers.
At BookScouter, just enter the ISBN for a book. The site will then search a bunch of online book selling sites, and it will display the price for each site. You then immediately know the best place to sell your book.
Improvements needed
I’m definitely excited about BookScouter, but I think the service could use a few key improvements.
Books not found – Some of the books I typed in weren’t found at all by BookScouter. I’m not sure why. But surely somebody wants to buy them, at least for a few cents. Maybe the cost of shipping the books in exceeds the profits that the online book selling sites can get.
One book at a time – You can only enter one ISBN at a time. If you are selling many books online, it would be much easier to enter a list of ISBN’s in a multi-line text box.
Difficult shipment planning – If you are really into selling books online, you’ll likely have lots of books to sell. But you probably don’t want to send 20 different boxes of books, one to each of the different book buyers. A cool feature for BookScouter would enable the user to enter multiple ISBN’s. Then you could also enter how many different shipments you are willing to make. BookScouter would then check all the prices and calculate which books to send to which book buyer to provide the specified number of shipments, but maximize your cash.
What do you think?
Have you tried BookScouter? What are your thoughts on it?
Photo by chotda
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Comments
3 Responses to “Selling Books Online – Find the Best Price”
August 29th, 2008
Andrew,
Thanks for the mention and for the suggestions.
As far as nobody buying some books, that is entirely possible. Could you send me a few sample ISBN’s and I’ll look into in some detail and verify though.
I’ve started some work on trying to look up multiple ISBN’s at a time. You and your readers can try it out Here. It is kind of primitive at the moment because I have gone back and forth on how exactly it should work. I’m certainly open to suggestions.
I’ll have to put some thought into your shipment planner idea.
Thanks,
Brandon Checketts
BookScouter.com
August 30th, 2008
@Brandon – No problem! I’ve really excited by your service!
I just re-tried a couple of the books that didn’t work before. They pulled up prices just fine this time. I have no idea what happened before. One of the ISBNs is 978-0-9406755-8-2 (Solo by Choice).
I look forward to seeing your future features!
October 8th, 2009
II LOVE BookScouter.com–it is an invaluable tool!
In addition to my own book habit, I recently ‘inherited’ hundreds of sci-fi paperbacks, all of which I want to sell. This site has proven to be an invaluable tool to me. It is accurate and I like how the buying sites are listed with their respective ratings when the book buy-back prices appear.
Previously, I had sold my books only to just one online book buy-back site. The three experiences I’d had with them were all very good but I started looking into other sites. Good thing, because for example a set of books that site will buy for $6.50, will also fetch me $36.50 on another site.
It is interesting to see the fluctuations of the book buy-back prices..some change from hour to hour. So, BookScouter has been particularly helpful to me in deciding what to sell when and at how much.
I also appreciate that BookScouter.com doesn’t require registration or a fee.
I agree with the functionality improvement of being able to enter multiple ISBNs, but I am grateful for it’s current capabilities!