Selling second hand books 🫤

[shellyleppard]

Trying to sell a book, read it once, published last year. The prices offered by online book sellers are terrible!!! Music magpie....48 pence, world of books £1.48 !!! Tried Facebook marketplace but I'm waiting for them to approve my age 😂😂😂😂 I'm 56 😂😂😂does anyone else think the price is very low on the resale sites?

You won’t get much more on Facebook market place I don’t think, most I see on there are advertised about £4-£5and then normally sell for £2-£3

They have to pay the cost of postage which is expensive, sort, store, resell, page for postage and pay for postage again and make money.

Try Vinted, that’s where I sell my books now.

@MyNattyLion is it any good??

Books don't hold their value the newer they are. If it's only published last year there will be many copies readily available.

I just give all mine to charity shops which is fine as long as they have space to accept them

I looked into this & no one pays, Vinted won’t either.

Books never hold value (apart from first editions or rare ones).

Second hand books are worth almost nothing except maybe to a collector or if they are rare. Sadly because they give great pleasure. Our local second hand bookshop pays 50p each in the form of a voucher to redeem against other second hand books.

I used to take mine on holiday and leave them in the hotel libraries...at least that way someone else got some pleasure from it.

Most resale sites off very low prices - I still use them because it’s a way to get books I won’t read again out of my house and getting a tenner for a box of books is a bonus, probably going on the next book I buy 😂

Some charity shops like Oxfam have branches that just specialise in books. You can get the latest titles for £2 - £3 in a just read once, nearly new condition and walk out the shop with it there and then.

You won't get much joy trying to get more than the prices you describe. People who want to pay will buy it new. People who don't care about a new book will just go for the cheapest.

Have you searched for your book on Amazon and ebay and abebooks to see how cheap you can get it?

Surely nobody expects to be able to sell a book for more than £1 or so? Most people I know just pass their books on to friends/ family for free. In the staff room at my work we have a bookshelf where you can leave and take books, nobody pays. Books are 50p in my nearest charity shop and free at the library. Unless you have a rare out of print/ first edition type book it’s unlikely you can make money from it.

I bought a hardback book today from the Air Ambulance shop. The Usborne History of Britain, £1.95. It retailed at £25.

2nd hand Books are cheap as chips.

I can't sell books (I'm a full time reseller on eBay and vinted), and world of books and the like have most of them on for less than it would cost me to post them. You get the occasional unusual one, but the vast majority that come my way end up being recycled.

Why not see if any of your friends fancy a book swap?

I give mine to a community library.

OP, you need to stop buying new books!

Well they're resale sites, so they need to have some chance of creating profit.

I think you're lucky they've offered you that much.

Local charity shop prices for books (often near to new) are from 25p to £2/3 - massive choice

Bundles of authors/hobbies/topics etc. might work better for you.

My late MIL had a huge library of books - maybe 1000ish. It's taken us years to empty our garage of them. Maybe 50 Folio books were sold, an NT second hand book shop took some, and the rest were very kindly taken by our local charity shop (including more Folio ones that had cost a lot of money but no-one wanted). Other charity shops, and libraries, weren't interested.

It's sad isn't it, I'm sure many people just bin them in the end.

We have one of those swap libraries near us in an old phone box - when I leave stacks of books or even old magazines in there they are always gone within a week! I have no idea who is taking them but someone is clearly happy to haul them away.

eBay, Amazon and Vinted don't really work for me, apart from the very odd occasion when I've put a book up for sale just as a film or telly adaptation of it has come out, or something like that.

I use World of Books; while some prices are very low, 45p or something, I sometimes get two or three quid for a book. Interestingly, novels by well-known authors and/or recent books (fiction and non-fiction) seem to attract the lowest prices, and more obscure books like yoga ones and, oddly, old computer programming books attract better prices. I've no idea what the algorithm or the logic is!
I use them because it's so easy; a few minutes to scan and pack them and organise pick-up, and then someone comes to your door and takes them away. I just want to get rid of my old books rather than maximise how much money I make out of them, so it works for me.

56 years old and still does not get what determines the value of an asset.
Hint: supply and demand.

Perhaps your local train station has a book swap or free book stall? I give quite a few books to mine, and I’m always pleased when I see that someone has taken any of them.

I only buy second hand books. There is a book stall in front of someone’s house in the village I live in. When I’ve read them I give them back and she sells them again.

They’re 50p each. She’s raised thousands for our village. I’d just donate it

I only tend to buy new if I think I’ll read it again. Otherwise buy from music magpie/world of books or wait until I see it in a charity shop. I recently sent 2 boxes of books to world of books for about £12, I’ve just ordered a dozen more for my kids for £30, that’s literally how they make their money, by buying the books for 50p each and then selling them on for £3.50. If they paid you £3 and sold on for £6, it’s literally cheap to buy new from amazon so there would be no viable business.