End of Year: The Textbook Dilemma
One of the inevitable tasks at the end of a school year is what exactly to do with textbooks. As any one who has had the pleasure of attending college recently can attest, these books are not cheap — I cringe when I think about how much I spend each semester — which makes the problem of what to do with them all the more difficult. Over time, though, I have started to figure out a system that works for me.
Sending Books Home
The first step I always take is to identify which books I might want to keep for the future. I have never found much use in keeping old textbooks with me at school — all they do is take up valuable space — so I generally pack up and ship home any books that I want to keep.
Unfortunately, textbooks are often quite heavy, which is never a good thing when shipping. Thankfully, the US Postal Service provides a special shipping rate for boxes that contain books and media only, called Media Mail shipping. It is not the fastest shipping method, but gets the job done — to ship a five pound book across the country from New York to LA, for example, would cost a little under eleven dollars using the normal parcel post, but only three and a half dollars using Media Mail.
Selling the Rest
That is usually the easy part — the hard part is dealing with the books I no longer want. I quickly learned that selling back to the campus bookstore is a terrible deal. So instead, I have generally been selling them on the internet.
Despite my initial concerns, It is actually remarkably simple to sell used textbooks online. There are lots of websites out there in this field (just try searching Google for “sell used textbooks“), but I generally stick with Half.com, which is a part of Ebay. With Half.com, the process usually goes something like this after registering:
- Select “Sell your stuff” and enter the ISBN number for the textbook
- Fill out the quality information and description, set a price, and list it for sale.
- Wait to be notified that you have a sale
Once you make a sale, you need to mail the book fairly quickly; Half.com provides you a small payment to cover shipping costs on-top of your sale price. For each transaction, Half.com takes a small commission for itself, and then the rest of your earnings are held in your account, and soon thereafter are direct deposited into your bank account. It all is very straightforward, and I have had nothing but pleasant experiences as both a buyer and seller on Half.com
Just a quick note on pricing: one of the nice things about Half.com is you get to see the range of prices at which other sellers are offering your book. Not surprisingly, the cheapest copies are what people gravitate towards, and as a result I generally will be fairly aggressively in listing my textbooks at the lower end of the price range. It may not maximize my return, but it usually results in a quicker sale.
Hibernation (Timing the Market)
The problem with textbook sales, though, is that because of the academic calendar’s structure, there is often a lag between the forces of supply and demand. You may be done with your textbook and want to get rid of it in May, but many students will not be looking for new textbooks until September. In May, its possible that no one will buy your book, or that you will have to sell it for a lower price than during peak demand.
My strategy to address this problem has been to store my textbooks over the summer. All year long I keep a box in my room where I keep textbooks that I want to list on Half.com; over the summer, I put it in storage, and as soon as I return in the fall I take the box of books and quickly put them for sale on Half.com. By waiting until the fall to sell, I have significantly more success recouping value from the books.
Other Resources
Many schools now offer localized on-campus textbook exchanges, which can be another way of getting value back from used textbooks. These school-specific programs have the advantage of an almost automatic supply and demand for entire sets of books, given that book lists and classes are often repeated. These are almost certainly worth checking out, too.
Using this combination, I have been fairly happy with my strategy for dealing with used textbooks.