Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman

Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman
I’m pretty sure I first heard about the practice of shopping for books with laser scanners in a story on NPR, which, as I recall it, disparaged their use as classless. And, really, it is precisely this. The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn’t need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche—I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I’m not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.

October 7, 2010 by Books

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2 Responses

  1. Anonymous says:
    October 7, 2010 at 5:34 pm

    I did this
    I used to sell books like this but now everyone and their dog is doing it. The current trick is finding books. Every thrift store and library book sale is inundated with booksellers with scanners.

    In regards to library book sales the library should be doing their own scanning and selling the books. Books with a low margin you can sell at the library book sale but books that go for $30 and up online you should sell yourself.

    Here is a fun trick to raise your library book sale numbers. Find one book that has a high resale amount. Copy the barcode into your computer and print new labels to cover up the old barcode on cheap books. When the scanner bookseller checks the book they will think the book is worth $50 because that is what their scanner tells them. You can sell a bunch of junk books to the scanner crowd this way.

    • Anonymous says:
      October 7, 2010 at 7:25 pm

      I like that idea…
      or just remove all the book jackets so they need to enter by hand…

      but yeah, every library should scan what they have an pull the good stuff for book sales… I got one from our library that listed on azon for $100+ that I paid the standard $2 for. but I don’t sell them because I’m too lazy to drive to the post office… not even for $90 profit…

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