From your experience is it better to sell your textbooks online or sell back to the university?
August 30th, 2009 Posted by: admin
Which yields greater returns? I buy my books used off Amazon and Half.com, saving about 25% if I can find all of my books online. Selling back is a different story. I feel like I am getting a better bargain if I resell through a website rather than going through the university itself. If I buy a book for $90 I can resell it for $75, and the website takes a small commission and reimburses me for shipping. So I end up making about $68–70.
How much would the unversity give me for the same book?
(I go to a UC school if that helps)
By: Jumanah A
Tags: Amazon, Bargain, Uc School
August 31st, 2009 at 15:20
You’re right, it’s better online. Unfortunately the biggest drawback with selling a book back to a university is that you and hundreds of other students at your school are all trying to sell the same book back, and once their bookstore reaches a certain threshold on a specific textbook they pay far less for any ones afterward. Plus they might not even take it back because of those unfortunate updated versions.
At least online you’ll have someone somewhere in America that will still need your textbook, and competition among other sellers is far less (especially if you’re looking at undercutting other sellers by a $1.00 or so in order to get your book listing ahead of the pack).
September 4th, 2009 at 00:50
Your all ready doing the right thing by using the internet instead of using your on campus bookstores. I was ripped off too many times before I started to get wise to this whole textbook racket that happens with in schools. So great job to you for figuring that out. You’ll never get the type of money you can from the school then you could online. I mean have you even ever tried posting your books to ? I use that site and its amazing for getting me back upwards of 75% for my books.
September 5th, 2009 at 04:52
One of the best ways for me has been to check cheapbooks.com. If you click on “Sell your books” and enter your ISBN, they’ll give you a list of quotes from several websites all of which will pay for your shipping. One of the sites that’s given me the best quotes has been webuytextbooks.com, but it all really depends on the book.
Barnesandnoble.com does it as well but they’re pretty cheap.
Also an new site, Chegg.com, has a really cool initiative. For every book you sell back to them, they’ll plant a tree, which I thought was really cool. They can pay you real money or give you Chegg dollars. Chegg is a new site that lets you rent a book instead of buying it, which helps you avoid the whole selling back fiasco in the first place (they also sell). I plan on renting a few books from them this semester. They came highly recommended to me.
I’ve had my books on amazon and half.com for a while now. It’s kind of frustrating to wait for someone to choose your books to buy out of tons of others, so selling them to a company cuts the hassle for me.
Hope this helps!