Companies such as WeBuyBooks, SellItBack, musicMagpie and other online book-buying services have made clearing unwanted books appear incredibly easy. Simply pick up a book. Scan the barcode. Get an offer. If they want it.
And that is the important point. These companies aren't offering to buy your entire book collection. Their systems are deciding, book by book, which titles they currently want. That might work to your advantage when you've got a small pile of modern paperbacks. But what happens when you're clearing a hundred or more books and they don’t all have barcodes or even an ISBN number?
You have to scan them one by one to find out if they will be accepted. And older books present another problem as they cannot be scanned. That doesn't make them worthless but it makes them difficult to sell through systems designed around scanning modern book identifiers.
So if you're clearing a large collection, ask yourself if you really want to spend hours finding out which books an algorithm wants – and then work out what to do with everything it doesn't? The alternative from The Sussex Book Collector allows you to clear the whole collection with no ‘cherry-picking’.
Our price per book is small. In fact, you could almost certainly make more money from the best individual books by selling them yourself. But that's the point. We don’t just take the cream and leave you with the rest. When we agree a collection we take the ordinary books alongside the more desirable ones.
The books worth £10 help make it possible for me to take books worth pennies. The books that sell quickly help support the ones that might take a year to find their next reader.
Before you scan every book in the house, why not let us take on the difficult job of finding the next person who wants to read your book.
