The days of waiting in long lines at your school’s bookstores hoping to trade in your books for 10% of the amount you paid for them in the first only to watch the bookstore mark them up 50% and sell them again are over. Just like in every industry, the Internet is starting to make its presence known and it’s fueling every startup’s competitive juices. These companies that make their home on the Net are asking the students to avoid the old brick and mortar store and sell their books online to them, and buy their used books online from them too. As I’ve just completed a semester of school and could use a little money, I figured I’d browse the online bookstores and see who would buy my books, how much money they’d give me, and how much they were re-selling them for. So here’s an investigative report into who’ll give you the most green for your dusty old books and who’s making the most selling them to others.

The websites I visited were: bigwords.com, varsitybooks.com, efollett.com, ecampus.com, classbook.com, and textbooks.com. I looked into selling and buying 3 books of mine—Financial Accounting, 2^nd Edition by Libby, Libby and Short, Intro. To Management Accounting, 11^th Edition by Horngren, Sundem, and Stratton, and Myths of Gender by Anne Fausto-Sterling. My original notions were that the 2 accounting books would fetch the most money because every business major needs to know the fundamentals of accounting and that Myths of Gender might be tough to sell because it was a very obscure book. Let’s just see how my hypotheses held up.

My first visit was to bigwords.com. They offered me $31.55 cash for the financial accounting book or $51.32 store credit. They offered $30.25 for the management accounting book or $49.52 store credit. And they offered me $1.65 for Myths of Gender or $2.70 store credit. I then looked to see how much they were re-selling those books for. Well, they sold the 3 for $74.81, $74.29, and $12.60 respectively. Now that is cheaper than the bookstore, but they’re making over $40 profit on 2 of the books.

My next stop was at varsitybooks.com. They did not offer to buy textbooks, but as for selling them, they were selling the financial accounting book for $66.63, the management accounting for $63.95, and Myths of Gender for $13.50. If you’re selling books, this obviously isn’t the site for you, but if you’re buying them, they offered the 2 accounting books for about $10 less each than bigwords.com.

I next moved onto efollett.com. To sell your books to efollett.com, you actually have to go into a participating bookstore and sell them there, so efollett.com isn’t your place to sell books. As for buying the 3 books used, I got price quotes of $70.25, $69.75, and $13.50. These prices fall somewhere between varsitybooks.com and bigwords.com. Based on these numbers, there’s really no reason to stop at efollett.com.

Ecampus.com was the next stop and they were offering $25 and $27 for the accounting books, but weren’t buying Myths of Gender. And as for re-selling the books, they were out of stock of used versions of all 3. This site seemed to be struggling to find people to buy books from, but they weren’t offering competitive prices to buy them.

Classbook.com was a relatively useful site. Graphically it left much to be desired, but they did offer $25.20 for each of the accounting books. And for the resale, only $66.63 and $63.95, the same prices as varsitybooks.com

My last stop was at textbooks.com. The only book they were buying was the managerial accounting book at $32.55. They were selling the financial accounting book for $70.35 and Myths of Gender for $13.00.

So what did all of my shopping around teach me?—that you need to shop around! No single site was the best in every category. Bigwords.com seemed to have the best selection and offer the most for your books, but for buying used books, varsitybooks.com looks like your best and cheapest option. So in your quest to sell your old books and buy ones for next semester, I’d recommend getting price quotes from all the websites I reviewed and then seeing what the good old brick and mortar store will offer you for them. If you’re willing to do the searching, you can get some pretty good deals.

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