Anonymous Patron writes “WFAA-TV Reports Used book stores used to be just about the only place to sell your old books. But times have changed. Consumer Reports says anyone can now sell books online for fast cash.
But you need to know the basics before you try to turn your books into bucks.
And while there are many sites that sell used books, Consumer Reports says stick with eBay and Amazon.com, because they have the most customer traffic.
Can libraries have used book sales this way?”
Online selling for libraries
Amazon has an advantage over eBay for selling books for your library because there is no cost to list. If you list a book on Amazon and it does not sell you are charged nothing. You have to pay to list every book on eBay. Every book that does not sell on eBay is an expense.
Other good way for libraries to sell books online is through abe.com or choosebooks.com. Abe.com is more well known but cost at a minimum $20 a month to list your books. Choosebooks does not charge to list but collects a fee after you have sold a book. Both of these sites are indexed by Bookfinder.com so if I search for a title at Bookfinder and you are selling it at Choosebooks it will tell me that.
There is a good reason to sell online. You can get the market value of the book. At the last “Friends of the Library Booksale” in my town I bought a copy of this book, “Roads to Space: An Oral History of the Soviet Space Program” for $1.50. Here is the cheapest copy I can find on the web.
Roads to Space: An Oral History of the Soviet Space Program
New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Limited. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 513 pages. Black and white photographs. Translated by Peter Berlin; edited by John Rhea. A detailed oral history of the origins of early rocketry and space exploration in the former U.S.S.R. ISBN:0076070956 Bookseller Inventory #TH9975
Price: US$ 150.00
This listing was from abe.com. They had other copies of this book but they were priced at $175 and $250. So I bought a copy of the book for $1.50 and it is worth 100 times that amount online. This book was weeded from my local library. This raises the question of whether libraries should check on the value of a book as part of the weeding process. The reason this book is going for $150 is because it is hard to get hold of. I would donate the copy back to the library if they wanted it but one problem with the weeding process is now they have stamped “withdrawn” all over it.
Weeding
Libraries weed books because they are no longer valuable to the service population, or they have been replaced by new editions, or in some cases, because the book is too damaged to repair. No book should be kept in a public library collection simply because it is rare – that’s the responsibility of repository or archival libraries. Some FoL organizations do sell rare books that have been donated for book sales, but most books that have been marked with library property stamps are not valuable to collectors unless they are very rare.
Re:Weeding
The book I mentioned is selling for $150 because it is hard to get not because it is a “collectors” item. I have sold an equivalent book called “The Little Toy Dog The Story of the Two RB-47 Flyers, Captain John R. McKone & Captain Freeman B. Olmstead” that was an x-library book for $80 becuase it is so hard to find the book. The library stamps did reduce the value but I still sold the book for $80.
No book should be kept in a public library collection simply because it is rare – that’s the responsibility of repository or archival libraries.
I would have to disrespectfully disagree with this statement. What library would I contact to take my rare copy of the Soviet Space book? Please be specific. It is nice to say in theory that a repository or archival library should be responsible for this but what happens in reality? What if they do not accept the book? Then do you just say “screw it” or does the public library step up to the plate and maintain a unique item?
King County does online book sales
King County Library System (WA), through their KCLS Foundation, has a shop on Amazon that lists 32,000 items right now. They stopped doing their annual “book sale” in favor of the online route due to the hours that organizing the book sale ate up among the volunteer staff. The KCLS leadership felt that those hours could be better spent in helping the system in other areas.
Here is the link from the KCLS web site:
http://www.kcls.org/foundation/#books
Buy Used Books on amazon.com
You can help support the literacy outreach programs of the King County Library System Foundation by buying used books on amazon.com. Go directly to a list of used books for sale through the Foundation at
http://www.amazon.com/shops/kcls
– or –
look for a specific title in used books and then check to see if KCLS offers a copy of that title.