I’m in the process of cleaning out all the stacks of books in my parents’ house. These piles of books are all stuff I’ve bought or have been given to me since I was about eight or nine years old. None of it’s ever been given away or thrown out or anything. Books kind of gravitate towards me.
When I started this project, I figured I’d have maybe 40 or 50 books that I could sell back to one of the used bookstores in Madison. I’m assuming they buy used books from the general public.
However, I’ve got one shelf left, and the number of books in my “sell” pile will probably break 400. :eek:
At this point, is it even worth calling a used bookseller? Do they have a limit as to how many books can be bought from any one person?
Or would it be a better idea to find a church or garage sale somewhere, rent a table, slap a sticker on the spine of each book and see what happens? …So what if I’m now living in a socially remote area where people don’t show up in large quantities for anything?
Sorry, I don’t know too much about used book sellers. I’m sure each has their own policy.
But I would suggest you try to sell them through Amazon’s used book sales. It is a little bit of a hassle because you are responsible for shipping, but Amazon processes the order and credits your account and it works out nicely.
That’d be a good idea too. Does anyone know how fast used books put up on Amazon generally get sold? I really don’t have a whole lot of storage space in my apartment, and I’ll be at the parents’ house for about 2 more weeks.
If you’re feeling charitable, make a list of the titles you have and ask your local library if they want them. You can probably get a phat tax deduction out of it.
You don’t even need to ask the library if they need the books. The library will do one of three things with them: 1) keep them and add them to the collection, 2) sell them to raise money or 3) throw them in the trash.
Just to follow up on the OP, used bookstores buy entire libraries from people all the time. A piddling 400 books would be nothing to them – IF the books are ones that they actually want. Used bookstores have limited storage space and quickly get to know what will sell to their customers. They may look through your pile of 400 and find only 17 that they choose to buy. Or 396. There’s no way to know before you try.
It will certainly be faster for you to take them to some local used bookstores and let them give you an estimate of how many they want and how much they are willing to spend. Compare that to the time it would take you to post 400 individual titles, complete with information on edition, condition, and price, on Amazon or any of the other web used book sites (alibrus, half.com, etc.).
Your only problem with going to a used book store with that big a pile is that they won’t want to look through it title by title and give you a good return. They’ll probably offer you a bulk price, that you could beat if you sold them in smaller increments. So it depends how important the money is to you. Don’t worry about the store turning down your collection, just don’t expect a lot for it.
My wife and I don’t like to have garage sales so we always give our books to small town librarys. We live in Rockford Ill. When we visit Madison we stop off in towns between us and you and the librarys just LOVE getting books for free, hardcover and softcover. Small towns don’t have a lot of money to spend on books.
Would you consider donating the books for younger readers to either a local literacy programme or a school library - in my experience, neither ever has anywhere enough books and it’s a shame when people develop a hunger for reading only to find there are no new books available.
If you are interested in selling them, you might want to check your titles on ebay or alibris.com to see if anything you have in your collection is valuable (to someone). That way you could narrow down what’s worth the time from what’s not and just donate the rest.
Note that in most metropolitan areas books donated to a library will not generally be put into the collection but will instead be sold cheap to raise money.
I go through a lot of books. My MO is typically to take the lot at the end of the year to a used book store. One of two things will happen: they’ll buy some, or they’ll buy all (at a much lower price) If any remain, I donate them to a library. Preferably a small town library, as odds are better they’ll make it to their collection.
If I have a good year, I bypass the used book store and donate all. Typically when selling I get between 15 cents (bad) and 1.00 (very good) per book. Most go for 35-40 c. When donating, I use 50c/paperback 1.00/hardback as the value of my charitable donation on my itemized deduction.
Selling to a used book store will also depend on what titles make up the collection. If it is all John Grisham, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and other best-sellers; chances are that the book store already has multiple copies of each title and will be less than interested. I would recommend making a list of the collection, noting hardcover/softcover, publishing date, edition, general condition, etc. The bookstore may be able to give you a general idea of whether or not they will take the title and you won’t have to lug all 400 down to the buying counter!
