Have too many books cluttering up your book shelves?! Not sure where to sell your used books? Or worse, what about all those expensive textbooks from college? Are you trending towards buying more digital books these days?
Me too.
So I decided it was time to cull the shelves. Making the decision to sell some of my books was not an easy one. I am an avid bookworm. Like, I love to read more than just about anything else. Give me a good book and a hot cup of coffee and you won’t hear anything from me for awhile. Not until I start looking for more coffee anyway.
Plus, another bonus that I found from selling books online was that this became an amazingly easy and quick way to make some easy cash. Most of the websites give you printable mailing slips so you won’t even have to pay for shipping, and the money was in my Paypal account in about a week. It was so easy! The only thing I spent money on was buying the packing boxes from the UPS store. But if you have those kinds of boxes around, then you will be ahead of me and really, the cost of the ink to print your mailing slips will be your biggest expense! lol!
Sell books online
There are so many websites and apps these days that will help you go through all those bookshelves, and piles of books around your house. Plus you can even make some money while you do it. Talk about a win/win! Two of my favorite websites that I have had the best luck with are bookscouter.com and Abebooks.com.
There are two ways you can upload your books to see if they can make you any money. First, you can type out all the ISBN numbers directly into their website. Second, most of the websites I researched when I was doing this had an app that I could download to my phone and then just scan the ISBN numbers using the camera on my phone. Talk about easy-peasy!
What I found though, was that I wanted to research every website to see if I was really getting the best deal. So I made a notepad document with the names of the books I was willing to part with (about half what I had), and then typed in the ISBN into my notepad document.
This way when I got on the laptop it was a simple copy/paste into each website to see what they were offering. This was ridiculously time consuming and turned out that basically if a book was wanted on one website, then it was also wanted on the others. And the amounts offered were pretty comparable, so I wouldn’t really suggest this method unless you have issues like me!
Sell textbooks
One unexpected bonus for me when tackling this project, was the fact that a few of my old textbooks were actually wanted by some of these websites. So put those old college textbooks to good use and make some money to boot! If you were anything like me back in college you got sick of buying your textbooks for hundreds of dollars and then selling them back to the bookstore for a mere 10-20 bucks.
At the time, I decided to just hold onto them upset at the highway robbery of it all. Now I have boxes out in the garage of old, worthless textbooks gathering dust. I know I kept mine at the time because they were so expensive that I didn’t want to sell them for pennies on the dollar. But what I found – after a few moves – is that these crazy books are heavy! And most of the information is online or outdated.
So out they went! Amazingly, quite a few of them are still worth something. I have been frequenting these websites and making a little bit from these books.
Used book stores
While, taking care of decluttering my bookshelves using online websites is easy, I also like to think local whenever I can. Whenever I am cleaning out the kids outgrown clothes, I do the same thing. I take the best clothes to consignment and try to get some money for them. Whatever is turned down by the consignment store gets immediately donated to a local family shelter that I like to support.
With books I have taken the same process that I use for clothes. Once the books have been decided, whether they go or stay, I follow through and get them out as quick as possible. So, whatever wasn’t taken by the online websites, I boxed up and stopped by a local used book store.
They took a couple and paid in cash – again not much, unless you have an insane number of books! But it was enough to treat myself to a yummy coffee drink (which I have severely limited since I want to stay home with the kids more than I want my fancy drinks!).
At this point the books that are left have no resale value. So I swing by my local library and donate them. This will get you a small deduction on your taxes, and more importantly gives you clean and clear bookshelves! Now, the books that remain are the ones that I truly treasure and want to read or reference again.
Conclusion
So join me in clearing out our garages and contributing to the coffee fund at the same time! Which one of these ideas are you going to check out? Are you finally going to get rid of those old dusty college textbooks! I can’t wait to hear how much you get for them!
