There are pros and cons for both but in short, if you sell it through a buy-back program, most companies pay shipping and will send you a check or put money in your PayPal account fairly quickly. You won't get as much as you would if you were to sell it yourself directly to a customer but you'll have to plan on doing a lot more work. For example, instead of printing a label from your computer and dropping it at the nearest UPS location, you'll have to post it with a description, answer questions and ship it. Shipping may be a big pain depending on whether you have access to a UPS/FedEx account or not. Most sites that facilitate selling will also have rating and some kind of protection for sellers and buyers. Regardless of where you decide to sell it, you'll still feel like you overpaid and aren't getting as much back but you may feel less so if you sell it yourself.

In short, if you're looking for a quick buck, sell it to Amazon or another company that will buy it back and be done with it. You won't have to worry about the dropping value or the time it takes to sell it (both transaction time and the hassle of doing the work). Below is a partial list of companies that will buy your books and resale them taking the hassle out of your life. I sold all of mine on Amazon.com because they tended to have the highest trade in value because they give you money via online credit. Since I love shopping on Amazon, I don't mind spending my proceeds there.

Amazon (they will give you trade-in credit): http://www.amazon.com/tradein

• http://www.bookbyte.com
• http://www.betterworld.com/buyback.aspx
• http://www.sellbackyourbook.com/
• http://textbooksrus.com
• http://www.bookjingle.com/
• http://www.cash4books.net
• http://www.textbookrecycling.com
• http://www.firstclassbooks.com/
• http://valorebooks.com/
• http://www.webuytextbooks.com/
• http://buyback.collegebooksdirect.com
• http://www.textbooks.com
• http://www.chegg.com/
• http://www.textbooklink.com/
• http://www.powells.com

I highly recommend that rather than checking the price at each of the above sites to find out where you could make the most, just go to www.bookscouter.com and they'll search these sites and tell you how much you'll get and where.

Here are the top markplace sites that enable you to sell it directly to a customer:

Ebay's Half.com site: www.half.com is probably the best and biggest marketplace for used textbooks followed by Amazon.com.

The challenge with DIY is that if you don't sell regularly online, you could end up with the books after they have lost even more value.

Also, you may consider trading your books: BookSwap.com and BookMooch.com

Finally, instead of buying your text books, you could lease them for much less. Check out www.chegg.com for details.

If you know of other DIY sites, please let me know.

Today's outage has lasted for at least 2 hours and is till continuing. If you think about it, given Amazon's revenue of $26.7 billion (according to their financial statements), each hour represents ~$304K in sales. Using 22.47% gross profit margin from their financial statements, that's roughly $68K in profit for each our that it is down. I'm sure EVERYONE at Amazon is aware of the issue and they are doing everything they can to restore service.

Here is a site that currently uses Amazon's store software and they are also affected by the outage: DVD Storage company.

Here is a link to an article that goes into more details: Amazon outage.

There are multiple configurations for this scenario. Is this a one-time event, e.g, you're ordering for the holidays or is this something where you have constant demand and you just need to establish an efficient Re-Order point that takes into consideration service level agreements, lost opportunities, ordering costs, and liquidation costs?

Here is the basic formula for Excel: =SQRT((2*DEMAND*ORDERING_COSTS)/(CARRYING_COSTS))

Where Demand= Number you expect to sell
Ordering Cost = The cost of placing the order (this is NOT the unit cost)
Carrying Cost = The cost of carrying inventory-this includes things like shrinkage, warehousing, etc. This should be calculated as a percentage of the unit cost. For example, if it costs me $10 for a widget and 10% to maintain it, the inventory carrying cost is = (10 *.10) = $1.

For a more detailed explanation, please see this website: Economic Order Quantity- EOQ

Also, see this Spreadsheet with some examples of One-Time event ordering. One Time Event Ordering.

I'll post some additional examples as soon as I get more time.

(Disclaimer- this is material adapted from an Operations Class at the University of Utah and not my original material)

Here is the first: http://www.export.gov/tradedata/index.asp. This is a site with trade data report. You can pick almost any product or category and start researching the numbers.

As it relates to blogging and websites, BIGGER words represent more frequent appearances in posts. If you click on one of the words, it brings up all posts that have used that "tag". If you're asking yourself, "What is a Tag?", wonder no more.

A TAG is an association to a topic, subject, project, etc. For example, when I wrote this article, I thought of the tags that summarize this post. They include: Tag cloud, blog, big words, how to, resources for websites, and several more.

More and more things are taking advantage of tags. For example, instead of creating folders for your email, some email programs let you enter tags. When you want to find that email, you simply search for all the tags that are related to the email you're trying to find.

Not too long ago a friend of mine told me about this site: http://www.tagcrowd.com. You can create a tag cloud from a list of words that you've created. Why would you want to do this? Well.... if  you want to reach the technologically advanced, you could create a tag crowd graphic for a presentation, brochure, etc. TagCrowd.com makes it easy. However, the ironic thing about this service is that they failed to include examples of tag clouds so others could see what they're all about. I sent them an email to suggest that they should create a gallery of clouds that have been created on their site.

To show you how it works, I copied the text from this blog and pasted it on TagCrowd. Here is an example of a Tag Cloud that was created as a result:

If you have the DPMO and need the short term sigma score, you can enter it in this spreadsheet.

Six Sigma DPMO

In addition, here are three questions that you need to answer:

1. What are your differentiating capabilities? How will you be different or better than competitors? You should try and stay away from "lower cost" as that has scalability issues. What changes can you make to solidify your position?
2. Who are your customers? Keep in mind that your perception of who your customers are may not be accurate. Take the time to meet with your customers. Ask them questions about other ways you can meet their needs. What made your existing customers choose you over competitors?
3. What expansion plans or diversification can you employ without sacrificing quality? There may be a temptation to do more than you could reasonably do. Avoid this as it could lead to your undoing.

For additional details, ideas and a case study of what could be done, take a look at "When New Products and Customer Loyalty Collide" by Regina Fazio Maruca and Amy L Halliday in the Harvard Business Review from November-December, 1993.

I used to try and explain our approach by telling people that we followed an "Agile" development process or an "XP development" process but in reality we have been doing continuous deployment. They key is using principles that are rooted in continuous improvement processes such as Six Sigma and asking the "5 Why's" and looking at root causes.

Read more about how to gets started with continuous deployment and some things you can do to maximize your chances for success: Continuous Deployment.

Here are some other relevant links: Lessons Learned Case Study and 5 Steps for Continuous Deployment.

Here is a video cast that I came across that makes this point. It goes into detail about how to have a structured approach to email marketing. This process based approach is applicable to not only email marketing but all other electronic marketing mediums and traditional mediums as well.

Here's the link: Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Marketing