Selling Used Books for Top Dollar: Earning More for Used Books

I cleaned out the last of my bookshelves this week and purged a bunch of books I haven’t read in ages. I’ve sold books on eBay in the past, but my last few book sales didn’t bring in much money. A number of the books sold for less than $2. This time, I didn’t want to go through the hassle of packaging and shipping to a zillion different buyers. Instead, I wanted to find a buyer and ship all of my books off to one location.

Top Dollar 4 Books

I’ve done this a couple of times before using both Cash4BooksTopDollar4Books, and BlueRectangle. I used BookScouter.com to find the book buying site providing the most money. With BookScouter, you simply type in the ISBN of the book you want to sell and click ‘Search for the Best Prices.’ The system scans 20+ book buying sites and provides the price each site will pay for the ISBN you entered.

After entering a bunch of ISBNs into BookScouter.com, I ultimately settled on selling my books to TextBooks.com. TextBooks.com wanted more of my books than any other vendor, and they offered more money for most of the books I had to offer. I only wish I had known about BookScouter.com before I sold books the last time. On average, the books I sold to TextBooks.com paid between $2 – $5, plus they provided a prepaid shipping label.

I also decided to keep a few books and post them on PaperBackSwap.com. I know a lot of people rave about these new book-swapping sites. So far, I haven’t seen any books I want to swap for, but I figure it can’t hurt to list them and see what happens.

7 thoughts on “Selling Used Books for Top Dollar: Earning More for Used Books”

  1. I’m glad that BookScouter.com worked out well for you. That’s exactly what I created it for and I enjoy hearing about people using it successfully.

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    • I have over 300 very old books I acquired from an 84 year old writer who recently passed away. I have only gone through maybe 20 books and already found two with author signatures. One was written by the founder of the Boy Scouts in 1914 and not only did he sign it on a certified thingy (lol not sure what in the world it’s called) but he also personally addressed the book to very important government official from that same time early 1900’s.
      there’s no telling how many more books I will find signature! I also have just a ton of vintage books and I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what to do with any of these….I need some guidance here because I would like to get the most I can, as anyone would. Is bookscouter.com going to work for my vintage, author signed books? If anyone would like to buy my books call me at area code five three zero nine two one, four four zero three.
      Thank you so much!!

      I apologize for any errors made in this comment, I’m using a broken cracked screen to write this.

      Reply
  2. bookins.com is also worth checking out. Everything is a flat $4.49 shipping fee and I’ve found recent best sellers there.

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  3. We’ve never had that many books to mail out at a time. When we do have a few, we always check Amazon first. If the used price is over $3, we post it there and have had really good luck selling through the site. Otherwise, I post it on PaperBackSwap. I also have most of the books I want just on a Wish List since there aren’t copies posted right now, but I have gotten a few gift-worthy children’s books through the site, which is nice for birthday gifts for my own kids or nieces and nephew.

    For the most part, my husband and I have stopped buying books. We get everything from our library (or interlibrary loan) and then only purchase books we believe will have lasting value as reference books or that we’ll read multiple times. It’s cleared a little shelf space for us (we still have five bookshelves full, not counting what my husband has in his office at the university), but mostly has helped us finally get our book-buying habits under control!

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  4. Glad to hear that you have used Cash4Books.net in the past. Did you know that we have a price matching service?

    We update Cash4Books.net constantly in an attempt to give you the best price we can for your books. From time to time, however, we miss an opportunity and we don’t want to do this!

    If you have found a better price elsewhere, please email us with the ISBN, the name of the online competitor, and the price that they quoted. We will promptly reply to let you know if we will match their used price quote.

    Thanks! Jim S., Cash4Books.net

    Reply
  5. Great list! You left off booksrun.com, one of the best textbooks online stores. They are caring about nature and plant trees for purchase!
    Excellent post.

    Reply

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