Intro to Buying & Selling Books Online

Series Summary

You’ve got a house full of books, many of which you haven’t looked at in years. Sure they make you feel studious and creative, but the bottom line now is you just plain need more space. Now you could just pack up all those books and drop them off at the local used book store, but they will not pay you what they are worth. Their game is to make as much profit as possible, so you are likely to feel insulted if you are expecting a reasonable offer. Or you could sell your books on-line, through auction and sales sites like eBay, Amazon or AbeBooks, which expose your books to a huge audience of potential buyers. But online book buyers are a hard-to-please crowd. They are looking for great deals and rarities. And if you have a book someone is willing to pay a lot of money for, you better know exactly how to list it. Or you will definitely get an angry email and a poor seller rating from your unhappy customer.

In this series of free internet commerce videos, our experienced bookseller will share her tips on how to sell books online. She will tell you how to determine the condition and value of your books and give you advice for repairing minor flaws. You will learn the right way to remove a price tag without leaving a trace and advice on how to cover your book with mylar to add value to it. Your book collection could be worth a fortune, but it could still cause you a lot of grief if you don’t know the crucial tips and information contained in this video series.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Molly Mackey and I’m with Expert Village. Today we’re going to talk about buying and purchasing books for resell on the internet for profit. I got my start working at the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. They taught me there about how to buy and certain things to look for in purchasing books for resell. I took it from there and became an independent bookseller where I would find most of my books on my own; I would go and scout them out at yard sales, thrift shops and estate sales. From there we built our inventory to about twenty-five thousand books currently that are online between my partner and I. It can be a very profitable business, but there are definitely some basics that you need to know to get yourself started. One of the most important steps in book buying; the most important thing is condition. Condition means everything when you are buying books. You can run across a really neat old book but if it looks like this, where it’s all water damaged, worn away, it does not matter the content, just don’t purchase it, it’s not worth it. There’s several different kinds of grading used for condition in the book world. Basically it starts from “poor” which would be a book like this that is water damaged, very unattractive, the only reason to list something like this would be for it’s content, if it had really high value and content was rare. "