I’ve noticed a terrible trend in the college culture around my school: selling textbooks back to universities and local bookstores. Even worse, some students don’t sell their books back at all. Some of them (brace yourself) throw them away!!!
Who needs this post?
1 | People who regularly fail to sell their books back to anyone.
2 | People who regularly sell their books back to universities/local stores.
3 | People who want to get more money back for their books
The Process
Log on to Amazon.com (or some other online marketplace like eBay or Craig’s List, I’ll use Amazon.com as an example since that’s where I sell).
If you haven’t already, click
It’s all worth it because I save somewhere between $20 and $70 for every book I sell on line, as opposed to going to the buyback station at my local book stores and actually losing at least half of what I paid for the book in the first place. Let me show you with nice, big, round numbers. Let’s say a text costs $100. I buy it, use it for the semester, and try to sell it back. The book store usually won’t give you more than half of what you bought the book for (and even that is asking for a lot), meaning that I won’t get more $50 for this $100 book. Now, if I go to Amazon.com, I’ll be able to sell the book for somewhere around $75 to some poor soul that needs a break on the costs of this particular text. By selling my book to this person via Amazon.com, three wonderful things happen. First, I feel smart for a day because I “outsmarted” the book store. Second, the person buying the book saves about $25/25% on a vital piece of educational material. Third, I get an extra $25/25% compared to what I would’ve received trying to sell my books back to the book store.
Because I take five classes every semester, this means I save about $250 a year (in a world where each of my textbooks is worth $100) just by selling on the web. I understand that there are other fees involved with selling online. Amazon.com takes a commission, and shipping has to be paid. But, whoever you sell to has to give you enough money to cover shipping, and Amazon.com is nice enough to take their commission out of combined price of the book and shipping, so I actually get more than I requested for a book every now and again since shipping’s pretty cheap where I live. This is why people can still turn a profit even when they sell small items for a penny.
Understand that this is not going to work out so smoothly every time, everywhere, for everybody. My hope is that you will at least understand that it is possible to get a much better price when selling (and buying) your text books online.
Questions?
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