How To - Make some extra cash by selling your old textbooks

If you're like me, you still have some old textbooks laying around from your college years.  I thought I might need some of the advanced science or engineering books for use in my career, but as it turns out I haven't even cracked one of them yet.  For that matter, I haven't even thought about looking anything up in them since I graduated a little over 4 years ago.  So when Pamela and I were cleaning out our office recently I decided to get rid of these books that were taking up valuable closet space.  Instead of just throwing them out I thought I would take a minute and see if they were worth anything, because I remembered paying quite a lot for them when I first bought them.  I guess textbooks dealing with science and engineering don't change all that often so there was still a market for them.  I was surprised to find that the lowest price for some of the books online was close to $100.  Don't get me wrong, some of the books could be had for $.75. 

The best way I've found to get rid of old textbooks is to sell them online through Half.com.  There are many places to buy textbooks at a discount online but not many places to sell yours for a decent rate.  Several websites I found would buy the books at an extremely discounted fee.  Think like the on campus bookstore where you could sell back a book for $10, that you bought the previous semester for $100.  Half.com is run by the same people as eBay but there are no auctions and the things you can sell are limited.  It's sort of like eBay's version of Amazon.com.  Anyway, you can enter the ISBN number from your textbooks and see what the going rates are for them.  If that book is selling for a decent amount you can go ahead and try to sell it. 

If you have an eBay account and PayPal account you are all set to start selling, otherwise you'll have to create those.  They are both free to create and maintain and only takes a few minutes if I remember correctly.  The PayPal might take a little longer if they need to confirm your bank account.  But don't worry PayPal is very trusted and safe, giving them your bank info will not open you up to internet scams or anything.  Once you have your accounts you can use the link on Half.com to sell your books.  A thing that I like to think helps me sell my books is actually writing a description with my book.  When buyers are looking at the books for sale they can either see the bland, auto-generated, description put in by the book warehouse or a detailed description of the actual book you will be selling and why they should buy it instead. 

Once you have listed your books it's then a waiting game.  The Half.com website will let you know by email when you have made a sale, and the next steps to take.  The email lets you know where to ship the book to, and the Half.com website has options where you can pay for your shipping right there.  I usually ship it on my own or have Pamela mail it for me, but you can use their methods if you like.  Half.com works as an escrow service and collects the money from the person buying the book so you know you'll receive the money.  They will however take a healthy cut of the book sale, somewhere between 10%-15% I believe, but in my opinion it is definitely worth it.  I don't think I could sell the books as easily for as much anywhere else. 

UPDATE:  I listed 15 of my books at Half.com that were worth anywhere from $8.00 to $110.  I tried to list it as cheaply as possible so they would be the first ones sold if anyone is actually trying to buy that book.  The total listing prices combined for all the books was around $700.  So far I've sold 4 books and after the Half.com fees I've made about $170.  Not bad for some old textbooks I had laying around.