One From DailyNews.com takes a look at book sales. A new kind of book buyer is roving the aisles at local library sales, looking to turn a profit by snapping up used books at cheap prices and selling them online.
After picking up a paperback for a quarter or a hardback for a buck, buyers are finding they can fetch a few dollars — or even several hundred — by selling the same tome online through sites including amazon.com and eBay.
Libraries would do well
to sell their more valuable weeded books to Library Book Sales which really focuses on the benefits to the library and not the individual bookseller, who is sometimes out to snag a profit from Friends and other groups who don’t understand the real monetary value of the used books.
FYI, In My Book® is proud to be a sponsor of their organization.
maybe the libraries should
actually look at the books more carefully when weeding if they are selling off first or signed editions??
Although every library sale I’ve ever been in (inlcuding ones I did myself) have just been full of knackered paperbacks and older non-fiction that noone ever read and is wholefully out of date, not anything actually useful.
Re:maybe the libraries should .25 table.
When I weed, if I have anything I think might be worth more than $25, I’ll do a quick search on addall.com or bibliofind, and tuck a note or printout in it so that our Friends can ask more than a quarter. The thing is, there’s a lot of really obscure stuff out there that most library friends or personnel might not have a clue about. The stuff that gets a higher price tag at our book sales are usually hardback best-sellers and coffeetable books in good shape, whereas the gold is usually relegated to the
The other problem is that most Friends groups or book sale organizers are volunteers, and that selling stuff online takes quite a time commitment. It’s probably worth it to pay a fee to someone who knows books.
Re:maybe the libraries should
A good middle ground in the tension between time and money for Friends groups is for them to contract with a seller. The seller skims the few potentially high dollar items before they even get to the public sale, and shares the gain 50/50 with the friends. The seller will be more motivated to the task than a volunteer might be, and the Friends will get $12.50 on that $25 book instead of just $1. The Friends still get to run a sale and reap the community-outreach benefits they might have lost if they had outsourced the whole sale to one of those big online sellers.
The downside is that the word may get out to the book scouts. They might give up on that lib’s sales, since all the potentially resellable books will be on the lower end and there’ll be next to no chance of finding a real rent-payer. Scouts buy a large percentage of the books at the sales I go to. The couple of libraries I know about that pre-skim, end up sending a larger amount of the books to the Girl Scouts or some other group at the end of the weekend. Then there’s also the potentially political issue of how the Friends choose a seller to contract with.