I’ve been selling books on Amazon for twenty year or so.
Most books are not worth trying to resell.
What’s sad about it? Paper is a silly obsolete storage medium. 100% of the value of a book is in the information, not the paper.
I totally get that owning paper books was a traditional indicia of an educated, or at least mentally awake, life. I certainly had a house-full of them up until about 20 years ago. To a large degree my library had become a monument to the interests of 25-35yo me, interests that had long since been replaced, or at least relegated to a place of lower priority, by newer interests.
Now I’ve got 1000x as many written words always at my fingertips. And barely a handful of physical books, most of which could easily be pitched without loss. Said another way, some very few monuments are still too emotionally precious to pitch. Yet.
In a similar vein, right now perfectly good pianos are being dumped into landfills by the hundreds a month. Because back in the 1940s every “good” family owned one. Soon enough the tsunami of landfill pianos will dry up as the last of the great piano-owning generation finish dying off and their perfectly serviceable but utterly unwanted pianos bite the dust. Music is bigger than ever. As are musicians. Pianos, not so much.
The tsunami of landfill paper books is in full swing now and has another WAG 30 years to run.
Not online, anyway.
Probably less than 1% of the books donated to the library are deemed (by me) listable on Amazon. However, we’ve had some pleasant surprises, like the 1970s guitarist I had never heard of before whose songbook sold for $200, and a 10-year-old book about the Vietnam War that also sold for $750.
There’s also a lot of stuff that I’ve listed, both there and at my home account, that have sat in storage for years. That’s a risk you take.
My father is a retired professor and he has multiple bookcases of lawbooks and other textbooks. Most of these are obsolete so my mother has been taking them to the transfer station and was told to put them in the landfill pile, not the mixed paper recycling pile. It’s a gradual process because the books are heavy so she can only take a few each week.
Anecdote: Several years ago, a former high-end motel that ended up being sold to the wrong owners was going to be demolished, and before this was done, the contents were going to be sold to the public. The news stories mentioned the library in the bar and restaurant, and when I went there, I found that probably 90% of the books were a) Reader’s Digest Condensed Books; b) infested with black mold; or c) Reader’s Digest Condensed Books that were infested with black mold. Those were just the books that were within reach; out of reach were shelves and shelves of old encyclopedias and - yes, you guessed it - obsolete law books, probably also infested with black mold and therefore of no use to anybody.
Demolition also consisted of dismantling it from the top down, because it was loaded with asbestos. One of my college roommates had worked at that restaurant for some years, and I attended a wedding reception there just before it had been sold, so I wonder how much toxic exposures we had in the process.
I confess confusion at this statement. You’ve been selling them for 20 years, yet most are not worth trying to resell. So…you’ve lost money for 20 years? What am I missing?
As to my own O.P.- I’m giving all of them to my brother. He’ll love them. I won’t miss them. Cost? Zero- I’m going down to Philly soon anyway to visit my Mom. Will pass them to bro then. Problem solved.
I do have this Captain Midnight novel from 1942. No dust jacket. Not even worth $ 25.00. I won’t keep it…
I don’t want to put words into DrFidelius’s mouth, but as somebody who also sells books, you quickly learn what books are worth spending the time listing and what books aren’t. Unless you have a battalion of helpers to do the grunt work, you’re better off concentrating on what is likely to resell and letting the others go.
I acquire inventory at tag sales and thrift stores. If I am lucky I can find three books worth reselling in a week.
Every suburban library around here has an annual book sale. For those who aren’t familiar, library book sales only contain a few ex-library books. The rest are donated by the community so that the library has a fund-raiser. Because library patrons tend toward high-end literates, piles of really good books - and resellable new hardbacks - can be found.
In every one, the first person in line is a dealer, armed with a rolling cart, a stack of boxes, and a scanner for ISBN numbers. Before the last person in line has gained entry, they’ll have filled a box or two. I’m sure the libraries love this guaranteed income, but we slow-moving mortals get screwed.
Ever heard of the Friends of the Tompkins Country Public Library? Probably no one outside a 100-mile radius has. But they are worth a pilgrimage. That’s the Ithaca public library, the college town of Cornell. The Friends own a large warehouse containing 250,000 books, meticulously sorted by subject, sub-subject, and alphabetical order. They hold booksales twice a year, and the stock will mostly turn over from one to the next. It’s a two-hour drive for me so I’ve never gotten there at opening but I still bring home two bookbags of books.
I’m wandering, but the point is that none of these sales could happen if the libraries had to buy books instead of having them donated and using free volunteer labor. Any online booksellers are competing, maybe unknowingly, against a huge ecosystem of books going back and forth outside the commercial arena.
The library in the town next to me allows scanners only on opening night, which is Friends of the Library only, and users must pay $20 and wear a wristband. They haven’t had to call the police since they started doing that.
None of the libraries around here are having sales, and some of them aren’t even taking donations, thanks to COVID. The one I work at allows donations at limited times, and quarantines them for 3 days before we sort them.
If you are already itemizing deductions on your taxes, donating them might be more lucrative than you think. According to this site, you can deduct the fair market price of the book or the price you paid, depending on the use the recipient will put it to. The resulting deduction will lower the amount of tax you pay by about one third of that amount. Depending on the books, that could be a significant sum. I’ve been doing this for years.
Of course, if you don’t itemize, this doesn’t work.
I would not depend too much on that site- because you can deduct the fair market value of property regardless of whether the charity hangs it on the wall or uses it as a prize ( It’s different for the person who wins the auction - they can only deduct what they paid in excess of fair market value ) and the only relevance of how long you’ve owned the item is whether the price you paid represents the fair market value- if I bought it yesterday and donate it today, the FMV is very likely what it cost me yesterday. Not necessarily the case if I bought it a year ago.
Point taken, but regardless the of value you put on the books, giving them even a nominal value will take something off your taxes, which is better than the negative income the OP was positing. And unlike trying to sell them, there’s virtually no work involved, apart from counting them and keeping track of the donation date.
According to TurboTax’s ItsDeductible app, the nominal value for hardcover books with “high value” is $6.00, “medium value” is $4.00, and for softcover it’s $4.00 and $2.50. So you can “make” between $0.83 and $2.00 per book, which is not bad if your alternative was to throw them out or otherwise get nothing for them. And if you can document higher values for some of them, so much the better.
Over the last decade, I’ve culled my book collection several times before moving, and have used those prices for hundreds of donated books, with not a peep from the IRS. I’m not going to go check all my tax forms, but I suspect I’ve saved several hundred dollars in taxes this way.