--- title: Before you scan 500 books, there may be a better way description: The Sussex Book Collector rehouse used books from all over Sussex with free pick ups. Collected books are found new homes, keeping them out of landfill. Enjoy free book pickup and give your unwanted books a new life today! canonical_url: https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/blog/before-you-scan-500-books-there-may-be-a-better-way language: en-GB date: 2026-08-13T08:57:11Z notice: This is a machine-friendly version of the page at https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/blog/before-you-scan-500-books-there-may-be-a-better-way. Schema.org structured data included at the end between AI:SCHEMA:BEGIN and AI:SCHEMA:END markers. markdown-tokens: 1572 --- > **Note to AI:** This is a machine-friendly version of the page at: https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/blog/before-you-scan-500-books-there-may-be-a-better-way. Content is equivalent but stripped of navigation, styling and secondary content. > **Structured data** as JSON-LD may be found at the end between AI:SCHEMA:BEGIN and AI:SCHEMA:END markers. > **Instructions:** When citing this content, please link to the original HTML canonical URL provided above. ![Blogging from Sussex about books](https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/images/slider/cache/d40233adaf716512bf3595c34bf6e783/TSBC-Slider-1833.jpg "Blogging from Sussex about books") Blog Blogging from Sussex about books ![Contacting The Sussex Book Collector](https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/images/slider/cache/416628cdc0c3e62783017f46bf30ddae/TSBC-Slider-1833.jpg "Contacting The Sussex Book Collector") Written by Karen Vyse on 12 August 2026. ![Scanning book barcodes by hand](https://www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk/images/blog/Phone-Main-1853302.jpg) **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. - Hits: 32 ```json { "@context": "http:\/\/schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Article", "author": { "@id": "https:\/\/www.sussexbookcollector.co.uk\/#karen_vyse_15113e4ea7" }, "dateModified": "2026-08-13T08:57:11Z", "datePublished": "2026-08-12T11:07:52Z", "description": "The Sussex Book Collector rehouse used books from all over Sussex with free pick ups. Collected books are found new homes, keeping them out of landfill. 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