Site Showcase Sunday: Online Booksellers

Friday I mentioned the book I found at Borders and my plan to sell it online here. I am showcasing several online booksellers I have used in the previous year. I made about $600 last year by selling off a ton of books from my teaching days that I no longer wanted to store. Keep in mind that you won't make millions doing this, but you will clean out your house, keep books out of landfills, and make some money.

If you have books to sell check out the websites below. Remember you will not pay shipping on the books you send to these booksellers.

• www.powells.com - Powell takes many children's books that many others do not.
• www.cash4books.net
• www.bluerectangle.com - Make sure you compare what companies offer. Blue Rectangle bought one of my books last year for $14 and two other websites were only offering $2!
• www.abebooks.com

You can also sell your books on www.ebay.com and www.half.com. You will have to find a buyer so it might take longer, but you might be able to make more money.

More Ways to Recycle Your Books!

It's time for another post on more ways you recycle your books, save money, and get new books to read for a very minimal fee! Previously I posted about using local used book stores to sell your books, I use that for many of my old teaching resources and heavier books (since postages is involved in PBS, PaperBackSwap). See here for more details for that post if you missed it.

What is PaperBackSwap? PBS is an online community where you can swap books, meaning you can recycle your books but also get new gently used books to read from others! The swapping is entirely online and they have a huge catelog of books ranging from fiction to cookbooks, children's literature to biographies. There is something for everyone, and you can even swap DVD's.

Also, when you sign up and post 10 books to your account that you want to swap, you'll get FREE credits to start you off that you can use to choose new reading material. The site is user friendly, and when someone requests a book they send you an email, and you follow a few easy steps. You can eve print off the shipping label at home, then toss it in your mailbox for convienent delivery. It's easy to use, is a good way of recycling books, and fun to get new reading material in the mail.

How do I get started? Click here, sign up (make sure you put in my nickname, savvyteacher as your referral!) and then start loading books onto your online bookshelf.

Happy Reading!
--Savvyteacher

Recycle Your Books, and Make Money Too!

Do you have books laying around, cluttering your house or collecting dust? Cookbooks you aren't using, textbooks from the past, or just a collection of random books?

There are several ways you can recycle these items, many of them online, but one way is to find a local used bookstore that "buys" books and offers store credit, and even better, cash for your old books.

If you happen to live in the Raleigh area, my favorite book buyback place is Edward McKay. They are located on Capital Blvd. and they offer both cash and store credit options for your books. If you aren't local, you can find something similar in almost any city or a city nearby.

This afternoon I took a bag full of books, including some old teacher books I wasn't using anymore, fiction, and a couple text books or books from college classes. They accepted about 30% of what I brought, and I received about $5 in store credit which I can use to pick out books from the store, and about $4 in cash. One tip to remember is that they only buy so many of a certain kind of book at a time, so don't write off those leftovers they didn't accept. I always hold on to them, try again in a month or so, and most often they are bought at another time. After a few tries, then I either try to sell or swap with my online sites, and as a last resort donate to a local thrift shop. Another thing to think about is deciding what kind of resource is best for which books. Anyhing that is current literature and recent textbooks I use online sites, because you get more money for your value. You need to decide which resource is the best for the books you have.

Stayed tuned for more tips on how to recycle your books!

--Savvyteacher