Sell your used text books online
There are several ways to sell your used text books online but they all boil down to two main ways: 1-Sell it through a buyback program or 2- Sell it yourself to a customer.
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.
