I have a few thousand old books, 80% of which do not have ISBN numbers. I’d like to sell them somehow; individually on Amazon or wherever I can get the best return. None are likely to be very valuable; many are 60 year old children’s books. It’s a mixed bag.
Does anyone have any advice or experience doing this? Or should I just donate a few truckloads to the local library’s book sale?
I buy used books on the american book exchange (abebooks.com). It’s where I started shopping for books online, because they had a lot of my textbooks for university. Not sure how a side by side comparison with Amazon would stack it up, though.
Well, abebooks.com is owned by Amazon, and discussions on some internet forums suggest that things have become worse for abebooks sellers since Amazon took over in 2008.
Another option is Alibris.
You should read the terms and conditions for sellers closely, including things like whether they take a cut of your shipping charges.
I’ve gone the easy route, when trimming down lately – Amazon. I’ve received far more per book than dealing with EBay, with much less overhead charges. I only got maybe around a few three hundred bucks, though, total, with quite a few OOP music books getting the most “per each.” YMMV.
I wouldn’t donate if you want some quick cash, though – I’m glad I was able to get some return, however small, on useless things like commentaries on Hegel or other irrelevantalia. A local bookstore is your worst bet, IMExperience – I live down the street from Pattyl’s Books in PDX, and it’s only good at best for picking up money for crack or half a whore. Nice people, in general, but you won’t get hardly anything from a local bookseller. See what flies on Amazon/Alibris/whatever, and then load a handtruck for your local bookstore to dump the rest. The latter won’t take what they can’t sell, though, as is perfectly sensible – so see if there are some big trash bins outside for dumping.
Wow, I did NOT know that. Thanks for the head’s up!
Curious that they would have two competing businesses going against one another!
Does the lack of ISBN numbers cause a problem with any of the online resellers?
No, you can just list the books by title.
BUT watch out for Amazon’s fees! They will kill you and pretty much make it not worth selling your books.
I’ve sold on Amazon for years–no complaint.
Fees are real, but my experience has been good overall.
We used to sell books on Amazon several years ago. We’d go to dozens of library sales and buy up hundreds - even thousands - of books, then list them on on Amazon, Alibris and Half.com. Sales were vigorous but the profits weren’t that great. The only time we made any money was when we started selling videos. We’ve been doing that since 2002 and now have our own website. We make enough to pay the bills and even have a small fulltime staff to help with packaging, bookkeeping and shipping.
The trick is finding videos that people are looking for. There’s so much competition out there.
At first we’d buy used DVDs. But there’s not much profit there. Then we had a Chinese manufacturer dropship for us. Worst experience I ever had. We were told the DVDs looked exactly like the American counterpart. This wasn’t true. There was Chinese writing on both the covers and the labels. More often than not these were returned to us by our Amazon customers.
After that we started doing research and finally found a supplier from whom we now purchase in bulk. And we’re quite happy with the product.
We no longer sell on Amazon, Alibris, Ebay or any other site where we have to pay a commission. We have our own site at sasquatchvideo.net People find us through Google Product Search. And we also have a small number of Amazon and Ebay sellers who we dropship for.
Google will soon be going to a pay-per-click format which I expect will be costly, so we’re looking for more people to dropship for. If you’re interested, go to www.sasquatchvideo.net/pages/dropshipping for details.
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