I loved this tip from Krista:
I saw the Cash4books site on your extra earning page and decided to check them out. I didn’t have much luck, so I decided to see if there were other places out there.
I found MyBookBuyer.com and started checking books with them. I am getting ready to send in 17 books which, if all are accepted, will net me $68. On the other site, I was only going to make $21. So, if you’re considering selling books, it pays to check multiple sites! -Krista
I just made about $250 selling a ton of old used books using these different sites mentioned! Thank you, thank you all! 🙂
How do you package the books you are shipping?
Thank you so much for this post! My husband literally just said a few days ago that he wants to sell a bunch of his art books! YAY! We are putting the money in our ‘new to us’ car fund – my hubby is upgrading his 1999 Camry w over 260,000 miles – probably just a minor upgrade bc we are doing it cash! This will totally help – thanks!!
We sell our books on half.com. I like half because I don’t ship anything unless the item sells and there’s a postage reimbursement (which almost, but not quite, covers postage plus delivery confirmation).
I have as one of my monthly tasks, a “go through books” task, where I take 15 minutes and gather any books I know we don’t need anymore from a bookshelf or two.
I won’t list a book for less than $2, because it’s not worth the time & packaging costs for me. I wrap books in a plastic grocery bag and then in brown paper over that. We’ve sold over $1000 in books in the last three years. Most of these were college textbooks and hardcover gaming books.
I find I have the best results right after I list something or right after I go in and edit my prices (I price things just under the lowest current price, then lower prices by a little bit, maybe 10%, each time I go in and edit again, every month or so). We have a bin in the attic with books I’ve listed in it, so when I make a sale I go up, retrieve the book, print the packing slip, wrap, and ship.
For books that aren’t too heavy, I list on paperbackswap, too. I put all my homeschooling books for the coming year on my wishlist and have saved a TON of money that way.
The best thing about selling used is how we’ve also started buying used books and using the library more. Our education costs (for the kids and for my husband the student) are way down!
Did you have to have purchased the book from Amazon to get them to buy it back?
Definitely not!
Just enter the ISBN or title in their Trade-In section and it will tell you how much credit they’ll give you. Shipping is free, so you just drop it off and once they approve it, the credit will show in your account.
Thanks for the response…I am going to take an hour today and plug in a large stack of books collecting dust in my garage. Thank you!
If you just want to clear out the clutter and aren’t worried about profit, you can also go to paperbackswap.com and list all your books there. You pay to ship them out, then you get a credit for any other book listed there. When you request a book, it comes to you for free after the credit. So, for instance, you can list a paperback novel that you’ve already read, ship it out for approx $2.15 book rate and then get a textbook back in place of it.
I used cash4books and was able to sell a few text books and a few non fiction books. I got about $30 for them, plus you don’t pay for shipping. I’ll have to try out these other ones just to see if they’ll take what cash4books rejected.
I have used Paperback Swap, but you just get book credits. We also have a local book store that buys back books, but they don’t offer much at all. Thanks for all the tips. I have a bag of books sitting here I would love to get some cash for.
Thanks ladies I have two dressers full of college text books I am needing to get rid of.
Glad to hear we’re not the only one lol
Ashlee beat me to the punch 🙂 I was just about to say that bookscouter is invaluable for selling books. Love, love, love it.
Can I just say THANK YOU?? I’ve been working for months to rid our basement of everything we no longer need/use and we’ve got an entire corner of boxes filled with our old college books. I need to get rid of them but had no idea how or where to. This is exactly what I needed.
I’ve been out of college too long (5 years). When I cleaned out a closet last fall, they were all too old so no one wanted them. I hope you have better luck!
I’ve been out for 5 years and hubby graduated 7 years ago. I only did mine because he still needs to sort through and decide what he can bear to part with (mind you we haven’t so much as flipped through any of these books in at least 4 1/2 years)…but so far with just mine I’ll get a little bit over $100. Hoping for more once hubby gets home.
Just wanted to add that I took a commentors suggestion and used BookScouter.com and it was super easy.
Thanks so much I will have to start going through all my books
I had a question when you say what you made, does that include what you paid for shipping, if not how much would you say it would cost? Just wondering. My husband and I have lots of books, plus he will be done with his PH.D in the Spring and he has ALOT of books that he wont need anymore 🙂 Thank you !
I’ve sold a bunch of books back to different sites and in most cases, the site pays for the shipping. Once you identify a book that you want to sell to them, they provide a prepaid shipping label and you have a certain length of time within which to send the book.
Thank you !!!!
I just sat down with 2 years of my husbands college text books and everyone of them had a better offer on Amazon than the multiple other sites that I checked. They ship for free and you get Amazon credit, which for us gets used easily. One book was $30 at every website I tried and $47 at Amazon. Worth the difference for us and we use Amazon enough to use the credit.
That’s interesting… when I sold 4 books, only one of them had the best offer from Amazon. I guess it depends on what you’re selling!
do you have a link for the amazon sell back?
Here you go. Good Luck.
http://www.amazon.com/Sell-Books/b/ref=amb_link_83819451_4?ie=UTF8&node=2205237011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=top-1&pf_rd_r=EA9A60B3FAC14C05B9FC&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_p=1309839902&pf_rd_i=textbook%20buyback%20program
are these just for textbook sales? or is it for fiction, etc as well?
No, I went to the site and they take all types of books. You can type in the ISBN number and see what they’ll pay.
I am in the process of trying to sell back my daughter’s college textbooks from college that I paid for. Amazon will buy them back and give you a Amazon Gift Card in exchange for them. This is different than you selling them yourself in the Marketplace. The other difference is you get credit, not cash. So, Amazon is offering me $74 credit for an algebra hard back text book. The link above, Mybookbuyer only offered me $37.09. So, you really have to decide, do you want cash or credit? Since my daughter is only a freshman, and I bought 6 books from Amazon, used last semester, I am certain I will use the credit in no time. The 3 books I am selling Amazon has offered $112 for.
I also gave my daughter a Kindle Fire for Christmas, which is an Amazon product. So the credit can also be used for buying e-books, apps, and hopefully in the future, online textbooks. Gov. Brown here in CA is trying to make all textbooks available online for all JC, UC, and State colleges in an effort to battle the high cost of college textbooks.
So for now, I am going with credit for Amazon because I know I will use it.
Yep, I just started using Amazon Trade-In recently! I got nearly $150 in Amazon credit from some of our old textbooks.
I always say that Amazon credit is like cash for me because I buy quite a bit on Amazon. 🙂
I like DealOz for selling (and buying) books because it compares multiple sites and shows you how much each one will pay you (or charge you) for the specified books.
http://dealoz.com/
This site was especially helpful for finding good deals on textbooks in college. I was often able to find books cheaper online somewhere (not always at the same book site which is why DealOz comes in handy) at the beginning of the semester and then figure out how to get the most money back for them at the end of the semester, often more than the bookstore would pay.
I just went through some books I had lying around a few weeks ago and ended up selling 4 books for about $75. I was able to get more money by searching with DealOz to figure out which website would pay me the most for each book, and ended up selling the 4 books to three different sites. It was a few more minutes of work to print the labels, package them up, and mail them individually, but I estimate that I made about $30 more than I would have if I had tried to sell them all to just one site.
Good luck!
I’ll have to check out the site – thanks! Half.com is one site that has worked really well for me over the years. No listing fees or any costs until the item sells, and listings never expire. Common books don’t move well there, but newer, in-demand titles can bring surprisingly high prices.
We use bookscouter.com which lists all the different sites so you can see who is giving you the most money. Love it. We went through last spring and made about $250 (we had tons of college books).
thanks im gonna try that now!
I also use bookscouter.com. I made close to $600 last year.
Wow! Thanks for the great article and the tips in the comment section! I have a huge stash of books and thought my only option for cash would be to sell them in a garage sale for pennies on the dollar! I’m going to check out the sites mentioned.
What types of books are you selling? Is it the ones pictured or others?