If you know what you’re doing, selling books and textbooks isn’t hard. As long as you have and list the right books, you should never have a problem finding someone to buy them. The hard part of course is finding the books. One lucrative section of the market is college textbooks. However, textbooks also present a unique set of challenges. First of all, they are time sensitive. You need to get textbooks within 1-3 years of publication or chances are good that a new edition will come out and you won’t be able to move them.
Secondly, you’re probably not going to find decent textbooks at library sales, garage sales or even tucked away in a friend’s attic. For these bad boys you’re going to have to go straight to the source: the students themselves.
You should also know that textbook buy back is extremely seasonal. While school is in session, the market kind of dries up, there’s almost no one selling or buying. Then once the semester or quarter ends, the floodgates open and buyback season gets into full swing.
No matter how you plan on getting textbooks, whether you have a brick-and-mortar store, set up a buyback website, or personally go down to the campus to buy textbooks, you’re going to have to make your case to convince students that you are their best option. A good example of how this can be done is an article called Textbook Buyback: Singing the Textbook Blues. It makes the case that selling textbooks back to the bookstore is a bad option, and that students are better off selling their books online.
The site, MyBookBuyer.com has found other creative ways to make their case to students, like this YouTube video.
They compare selling on MyBookBuyer to all of students’ other choices, including the bookstore, sites like half.com and even rental services. The use of humor helps them promote themselves without alienating their intended audience.
You don’t have to set up a fancy website with articles and videos to start selling used textbooks. But you do have to be aware that students have a range of options, some of them very attractive, so be prepared to explain why they should sell their books to you instead of listing them on Amazon themselves.
There’s been a lot of speculation lately about what the future of reading will look like. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard a lot about the Kindle and a lot of peoples various opinions on what impact, if any, it will have on the publishing industry.