The question I hear most often is: Where do you find quality books at reasonable prices? The answer is-and this is the truest thing I know-BOOKS ARE EVERYWHERE. Even good ones. You must simply sharpen your perception.
Used bookstores of the brick-and-mortar (B&M) type, for example, are packed with quality books. It's true that most of the books are priced at or above what you might be able to sell them for online. But I'll let you in on one of the biggest secrets I know: there's an entire, underground family of books that don't command strong prices in B&M venues but rock the world on eBay.
These are the ones that require heightened perception to find, and almost every store has at least a few of them. In this circumstance more than any other, careful research pays off. I spend several hundred dollars a month purchasing inventory in used bookstores, and they're one of my best and steadiest sources.
Naturally some sources are better than others. I've compiled a list of my best five in order of importance. The list will vary for everyone, but these are the ones that work well for the area I live in.
1. ESTATE SALES. My best source of books, hands down. Somebody dies, and typically the entire contents of a house are offered for sale to settle an estate. More often than not, the deceased is elderly and has acquired books over a lifetime. Also, estate liquidators often price books low because it's labor intensive to research individual titles, and there's often a large number of them.
Warning: this is a competitive area. Show up early and be prepared to pull books off shelves quickly, primarily on instinct alone-oh, yes, and sometimes be shoved while you're doing it. You'll have little time to ponder a purchase, but what you can do is load up a basket of things that catch your eye and sort through them later, before you go to the checkout table.
2. USED BOOKSTORES. An excellent source for the reason stated at the beginning of this article. Example: I recently purchased a vintage history of a church in New England for $2.50 at a local used bookstore. This store was over a thousand miles away from New England, so the likelihood of its selling in that venue was next to nothing, thus the low price. However, I sold it on eBay the following week for $100. Why? Because eBay brings New England to me.
NOTE: You might be amazed at how many used bookstores and thrift shops are in your area that you were never aware of. is an excellent Web site for locating them, complete with maps and telephone numbers.
3. THRIFT SHOPS. I think I have more fun here than anywhere else. These places are often half-hidden in out-of-the-way locations, dirty and dimly-lit, all factors which contribute to the aura of adventure. Treasures can be found, but a good deal of patience is necessary because, frankly, there's lots of garbage to look through, especially (inexplicably) untold numbers of microwave cookbooks. I usually spend a few hours a month looking in a dozen or so shops. With the exception of Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, which have raised prices in recent months, books can be had for next to nothing.
4. CLASSIFIED ADS. This isn't for everybody, but I run an ad in the classified section of the newspaper about once a month and title it "CASH FOR BOOKS." Be prepared to get dozens of calls from sellers wanting to part with their "valuable" Reader's Digest Condensed Books, back issues of National Geographic, and hopelessly outdated encyclopedias. But if you're patient, an occasional call will come from, say, an elderly widow wanting to clean up the "mess" in her garage, most of which consists of boxes and boxes of her deceased husband's old books.
The downside of this approach is that it requires a fair amount of cash on hand that can be used at a moment's notice, sometimes as much as $1,000 or more, but the payoffs are potentially huge. Example: several months ago I purchased over 8,000 vintage car brochures for $350 from my ad. I recovered my investment on the first 20 or 30 I listed.
5. ONLINE. Yes, if you had no other means of purchasing books for resale, you could conceivably make a living using this source alone. There are several methods for doing this, but the best one is the simplest: research eBay closed auctions of strong selling books and search for them on other sites at bargain prices. Once you find a potential winner, inquire in detail about the condition and publication data before purchasing. Mistakes are easy to make here, so start slowly. It's also possible to buy low and sell high without ever leaving eBay, but this requires a more sophisticated approach that would be better left to a future article.
Additional sources, though not usually as productive for me, include: church sales, garage sales, library sales, word of mouth and auctions-and sometimes, just plain ingenuity. In general, things work best for me when I use a variety of sources and don't depend on one or two for my entire inventory. Also, using this approach, I've never been in a position of running out of quality books to sell.
Once you've purchased your books, it's time to sell them, and if you're doing this on eBay, presentation is of critical importance. More about this next time in Part IV: Presenting Books For Auction.
About the author:
Craig Stark is a full-time online bookseller and former Editor of The Bookologist, a newsletter from the publisher of AuctionBytes.
