Flashes of Panic

I hinted last week that I was putting used books on Amazon. They make it relatively easy to sell your used books, but that doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do in all cases.

The catch is that Amazon charges a commission of $0.99 plus 15% of your sale price. So if you sell a book for $1.00, Amazon’s commission is $1.14, and you’re actually $0.14 in the hole. They do give you a shipping credit of $2.26, and that’s where the margin actually appears: mailing the average paperback book by the USPS’s “media mail” rate costs about $1.24. So there’s about dollar to play with there on most books. Half of that goes to packaging; I get padded envelopes from Hastings for $0.52, but I suspect many used-book sellers have more efficient (cheaper) packaging operations. Also, depending on what your level of urgency is, you might find it worthwhile to clear just a nickel on particular books in order to get rid of them. For me, if that’s as good as I’m going to do, I’d rather donate it.

So what I did was wade through the stack of books, putting in the ISBNs and seeing what the current lowest price was for each one. I set an arbitrary break point of $1.50. If the current lowest price was under that (and many were as low as $0.01), I put it back on the “give away” stack. If it was higher, I set a price between five and ten cents lower than the current low price, and listed it. I wound up listing somewhere around a quarter of the give-away stacks for both A and I, and if you saw my list at its height, you’d probably be a bit shocked right now at how many we’re giving away. (I’m keeping about five times even that number—unfortunately for moving days, I have a pretty big library.)

What has really surprised me is how quickly I’ve sold as many as I have. A textbook I listed didn’t stay 24 hours. For a sample, I bought ten envelopes on Sunday morning; on Sunday evening, I had nine of them packed for shipping. I currently have more orders to ship than I have envelopes. In the not-quite-week since I started, I’ve sold seventeen books to sixteen people, from Maine to Guam to Puerto Rico. Total value of the transactions is over $100; my margin is a little less than 60% from Amazon, and I think I’ve paid another 20% to 25% in shipping fees and packaging. So you’ll see that I’m not making a business out of this. Maybe it will buy me a textbook or two in the fall; maybe it will buy A dinner.

Even if I wanted to keep it up, the inventory is highly perishable; once I’m out of books, I can’t get more. Anyway, I can’t leave things on sale until they sell. In the week before the move I will close all the listings and move any remaining books back to the “donate” pile, and find them a home elsewhere.