The WorkGroup

Today I’m going to talk a little more about selling used books on Amazon.

Once upon a time, like I said, this was a pretty easy way of making money. Time-consuming, but easy. It wasn’t tough to go to a garage sale or even a goodwill and pick up books you could sell for a meaningful amount, which to me, meant about $15 and up. And the more you did it, the easier it became to identify these types of books in advance, and not buy too many doorstops (although some people took the guesswork out of it, and brought wireless Internet devices on their shopping trips so they could look up the value on Amazon in real-time. Those people were sort of thought to be cheating).

In my opinion, you’re never going to get rich buying and selling these types of consumer goods, but it was a decent bit of cash on the side. And then the competition got fiercer, and garage sales weren’t that helpful anymore, because a book that used to sell at $15 now sold for $6. Which was Not Worth It territory.

But there was still some money to be had in a process you could call used book arbitrage. That involved looking for ghastly-underpriced books as efficiently as possible, then selling them for their “true value” elsewhere. One of the best places to buy underpriced books is eBay, and the best place to sell them is Amazon, where books reliably sell for more than anywhere else.

I found that a good type of book to buy off eBay was the highly scientific or technical type. The people that buy these books are not price-sensitive, and their motives are usually closer to needs then wants. The downside is that some of the more esoteric but valuable titles were very slow sellers. You had to be prepared to sit on them if you wanted to get something close to their “true value.”

This is turning into a novel, so I’ll talk a little more about the process of used book arbitrage in my next post!

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