Used Books Sales

I spent the last two Fridays looking through thousands of used books at two local library sales. These were BIG sales that I found about on booksalefinder.com. BIG is how booksalefinder described them - which means I think that they paid for a big advertisement listing on the site. They were also big in quantities of books. They were also my first experience with "professional" used book sellers. You can tell who are the professionals - for one thing they usually have two or three people with them. Then they gather up stacks of books and hoard them in a corner, where one of their team members checks the ISBN number on their cell phone or palmtop which is hooked up to a service that checks their current value on Amazon.com. Some even had little scanner thingys that they could scan the ISBN numbers in to check the value. And then there was me, by myself and with no fancy electronic gizmo's. I did okay. When I stuck to the older books - the ones with no ISBN listed I generally came up with something of value. I believe that the pro's skipped these books because they are too difficult to look up with their book checker thingy's. I had first heard about these services on Steve Webbers Book Selling blog - they are expensive ($40 bucks a month - far too much for me at this point.)

I did "screw up" on one purchase. The second sale I went to had a "treasures" room filled with books they thought were worth more than the set 2 bucks for hardbacks. The book I bought was called "What a Young Girl Ought to Know", originally written in 1897, my copy was published in 1928, and it is about sex of course. Though it spends chapters leading up to it and literally discussing the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees. It is an interesting read, and though I won't be able to make back the $15.00 I paid for it - I think it was worth the price... (I can always give it to my daughters ).

Anyway, I am up to about 150 books for sale on Amazon. Now I just have to get them organized...