*Cashing in on Your Used Books*
By: NightHiker
03 February 2010

Although this is written from a homeschooler's perspective, I hope that anybody who finds they have books that they don't need can benefit from my experience.

We’re a homeschool family (3 kids currently in grades 7 through 10) and we go through a LOT of books so I thought I’d share some FNV experience concerning books - mainly what we do with those that we don’t want to keep. Obviously reselling them makes a lot of sense but where you resell them can make a big difference in how much you can get for them. Here are a couple of ways we cash in on our excess books and the the pros & cons that we have discovered. Since details of everybody's situation are different, the pros & cons may vary.

Curriculum Fair- Our local homeschool group has an annual curriculum sale. It’s basically a huge yard sale for homeschoolers in our area – we put a price tag on our books, make a list and drop them off the day before the sale. When the sale is over we come back and pick up what didn’t sell and the list of what did. They do all the work (apart from listing and labeling). About a week or so later we get a check from the group (after they’ve cashed all the checks they received) for the amount, minus 10% which goes to the homeschool group. Your local group(s) may do things differently, such as requiring you to man your table.

Last summer we took 193 books and sold a little more than half of them. We made $330.

Pros
• Very easy
• We can price and list our books at our leisure, little by little or all at once
• Minimal effort just drop them off and then pick up the leftover
• The ones that do sell are sold for the price we want
• The result is cash
• We can also sell misc educational items like maps/globes, microscopes & science supplies, etc.

Cons
• The number of potential buyers varies from area to area
• Percentage of sale goes to the group (your local group may do something different, like maybe an up-front table rental fee)
• The timing of your curriculum/book fair may not be convenient

Bookstore- The books that are leftover get taken to one of our local bookstores that will buy used books (we take ours to Hastings). Besides the leftover school books we also take in any other books that we want to get rid of. They’ll scan the books and see if they want any of them. They may not need some of the books at that particular store at that particular time, those books eventually get taken to another Hastings or brought back there on our next trip.

Sometimes you will be given the option of getting cash or they will give you a little more for your book if you’ll take it in an in-store credit instead. Shop around your local bookstores – find out which ones will buy used books, their policies and which ones offer an educators discount for homeschoolers (we get a 20% educators discount on purchase and when combined with the in-store credit we are able to get a little more milage out of our turn ins.

Last weekend we did some house cleaning and came up with several boxes of books, mostly children’s picture books from when our kids were little but also quite a few from past book club memberships. We went in with 4 boxes of books and came out with 2 boxes and $110 on our Hastings card.

Pros
• Quick and Easy
• Books that they don’t buy one day they may buy at a later date
• If we use the credit to buy books we are able to stretch it even further by using the 20% educators discount that the store offers homeschoolers

Cons
• In store credit or a lesser cash
• The buyback price is often low
• They don’t take all books and those they do take they may not take all the time depending on their current stock
• May require multiple trips and/or multiple stores

Internet- We quite doing this but since it IS an option I thought I should list it. In addition to the numerous online sites like e-bay and Craigslist there are hundreds of websites for homeschoolers that have some type of forum for buying, selling and/or trading your curriculum. We sold our books on a homeschool forum for a while and although it worked fine, as far as being able to sell our books for the price we wanted, we found that posting single books (or small bundles of books), monitoring emails and then packaging and mailing the books was just too time consuming. We also had several instances of buyers taking a very long time to submit their payment and a coupled of bounced checks.

Pros
• You can do it from your house
• You determine the price
• You can post your books on as many websites as you want

Cons
• You’re basically selling books one at a time (fine for small numbers of books)
• Time consuming
• Shipping & handling issues
• Payment delays, insufficient funds from personal checks

Other Options

• If we really just want to get rid of a book (one that doesn’t sell at the curriculum sale and the book store won’t buy back) we put it out at our annual yard sale.
• If it doesn’t sell at the yard sale the book is on its way to our local thrift store. Don’t think it’s just being thrown out though because donations count towards charitable contributions on income tax. For the 2009 tax deductions textbooks were worth $9, hardbacks $4 and paperbacks $3. Just keep track of what you donate (we use the free "It’s Deductible" program from TurboTax).

www.alpharubicon.com
All materials at this site not otherwise credited are Copyright © 1996 - 2010 Trip Williams. All rights reserved. May be reproduced for personal use only. Use of any material contained herein is subject to stated terms or written permission.