Time vs. Money
You know those old books you have that you know are worth something? Well, I had many of them that came with my house. Really. The house had been sold by someone’s estate “as is,” which meant it came with everything that was in the house when the gentleman and his late wife last lived here. Needless to say, we have done a lot of cleaning out. The office has two walls of built-in bookshelves. I have already donated a lot of the books, but others were not really in the way while I was mostly just using the desk. However, it was time to finally clear out the rest of the old and fully set up the room with only my own things.
I already knew that popular books, even autographed ones, aren’t worth much, as they are more plentiful in the marketplace. However, this office had a lot of books on research and statistics, with a sprinkling of psychological testing. Aha! Non-fiction sells better on the second-hand book market. So, I decided to see what I could find to sell.
I downloaded the BookScouter app, where you can scan an ISBN barcode to find out which book outlets are interested in buying your book. It’s so fast! It also shows the lowest price at which that book is offered on Amazon. However, you don’t really know if anyone is willing to purchase it at the price. (Pro tip: If you want to check the value of something on eBay, always be sure to filter for items that have already been sold to see what the real current market value is.)
The other challenge with these books is that the majority of them were published before 1980 and didn’t have an ISBN barcode printed. For those that had an ISBN at all, I was able to type the number into the app. For books published earlier than 1970, there was no ISBN. Most of them had a Library of Congress number, but researching that took a few extra minutes and wasn’t always successful. Sometimes, I had to just type the book title and author into a browser and see what came up. All in all, I spent 10-12 hours researching these books and sorting them into “donate” or “sellable” piles. I tossed a few books along the way, too, if their bindings were destroyed or there was other significant damage.
After all that time and effort, I found that only six of the books I had were both worth something AND had vendors willing to purchase them through BookScouter. And wait until you hear the prices being offered! I could sell them for anywhere from 63-cents to 89-cents a piece. There was one more in-demand tome that would fetch a higher price. I could get an entire $3 for that one!
So, the moral of the story is that I should take my own advice. My time is worth more than the money I might earn from selling something. I’m not a specialist or expert who has learned from experience how to look books up efficiently, what might really be worth selling, and how and where to do that. I am better off taking the whole lot to my local library for their next book sale. Someone who specializes in buying and selling obscure books—and has the warehouse and shipping system to manage their sale—can find them there, and the library can make a little money.