Discouraging advice on how to sell your unwanted books to used bookstores
- Mark Mathew Braunstein
- Feb 25
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 27
Call me materialistic insofar as I prefer to own the books that I have read. Unfortunately, I am often left with books that I had hoped to read but never read and never will read. So around once every 15 years, I venture to the used bookstores to unburden myself of my orphaned books.
Many years ago, while living for five years in Manhattan, I made several cab trips with armfuls of my unwanted books to Strand Bookstore, NYC’s largest used bookstore. Two weeks ago, I repeated the ordeal and made three trips, each time with a carload full of books to Book Barn, my region’s largest used bookstore. Hence, my discouraging advice about selling your paperback and hardbacks books to used bookstores.
Be prepared to return home with half of your books unsold. Lugging heavy books from home to car trunk to bookstore and again to car trunk and again to home rarely can be worth your time and effort. (Even more cumbersome if you must resort to public transportation.) Best to leave at home your paperbacks, and to pawn off only your hardbacks, as you are more likely to sell most of your hardbound books.
Now the big BUT. At the conclusion of their hasty appraisal of your entire load of books while you watched helplessly as they rummaged through your trove, be prepared for disappointment, if not humiliation. What used bookstores offer to pay you will be dismal. They quote you one lump sum for your load of books, rarely if ever for individual books. If for, say, your scholarly hardbound book published by an academic press, a first printing in mint condition with its dust jacket intact, they will offer to pay you one-tenth of the price at which they will eventually sell it. This is standard protocol for nearly all used bookstores.
Unless you are impoverished, you’re better off sparing yourself the time and trouble, and instead to donate your books to your local public library. (Forget college libraries, as they now prefer to accession eBooks over print books, so don’t want your cherished books, no matter how scholarly.) Yet, even your public library will be as selective and unwelcoming, and most of the books they do accept from you will not be accessioned into their collection , but instead will be sold at their annual fundraiser book sale. The sad fact is that 99-percent of all used books, when measured solely in monetary terms of resale value, are nearly totally worthless.
How to remedy this, at least partially? Buy your books only from used bookstores. That way, when you sell books back to them, your financial loss is not as a large had you purchased them new. Or shun materialistic proclivities. Continue to read books, but don’t buy the darn things (except, of course, for mine). Check out books from your local public or college library, thereby enacting both meanings of the phrase “check it out.”
Blog posting by Mark Mathew Braunstein
