Turning Clutter Into Cash…. My Cash4Books Experiment

I love books…. I don’t always have a lot of time to read….. but man do I love a good book. These days I prefer to read books on my Kindle, so I rarely buy any book printed on paper- unless it is not available on the Kindle (some of our book club picks are not currently-published books, so they aren’t always available for the Kindle). The walls of my home office are full of bookshelves- and they are all loaded with my books. Most of these books I have no real emotional attachment to the story itself- it’s just that books as a category are precious to me, and I find it hard to part with them, unless I am lending them out to a friend to read.

Can I Turn Some of These Books Into Cash?

I was chatting with a girlfriend the other day about the large amount of books we each have on our bookshelves at home, and she told me that her Mom was kind of drowning in old books awhile back, until her Mom found a way to sell her books online- with a company called Cash4Books. She told me that you simply type in the ISBN number for the book, and they will tell you whether or not they are buying that book, and for what amount of money. If you decide to sell your book, you add it the “online cart”, and then print off a pre-paid mailing label to mail the books back to them. Once they receive the books and are assured that they are in good condition, Cash4Books send you a check. Sounds easy, right?

My Cash4Books Experiment

So when I got home, I grabbed a whole shelf full of books (38 of them) and sorted out the 4 books that I either hadn’t read yet, or didn’t want to part with, and started entering the ISBN numbers for all of the remaining 34 books into the Cash4Books website. Clearly my friend’s Mom must read better-quality or harder-to-find books than the ones that I read, because Cash4Books was not interested in buying the vast majority of my books. And the total value of those 5 books they did want to buy were worth $5.41.  Bummer……

But, an experiment is an experiment, so I packed those 5 books into a box, slapped on that pre-paid address label, and carted the box off to the post office on the same day that I delivered my Ebay shipments from my Ebay experiment. It’s only been two days since I mailed the package, and it is too early for me to actually receive my check in the mail…. so I cannot yet report on the timeliness of their payment.

Any alternatives?

Disappointed with how few books I was able to clear out, I spent some time searching online for other book buyers, with no luck in finding anyone to take anything that Cash4Books wasn’t buying….. until I stumbled upon Half.com, a division of Ebay that specializes in the re-sale of books, CDs, video games, and movies. It sounds like you can list items that you would like to sell, and Half.com will help you set a price for that item, and then buyers can make an offer. I would love to hear from someone who has used Half.com to clear out some of their old books…. did it work? Is it worth the effort to sell old books individually like this?