Selling used cookbooks on Amazon

[emmalish]

I can't even count how many cookbooks I have that are valued at 1 cent. Well, I guess I could count. It has to be at least 200. I don't even know what I'm going to do with them.

Can you donate them? I've never looked into it, but would schools be interested in cookbooks?

[Fat Guy]

Donations are theoretically possible but not easily accomplished in New York City. The organizations I've checked with won't pick up, and with this quantity of books we're looking at hundreds of dollars to pay someone to transport them -- not to mention all the time spent packing them up in boxes. The library near me doesn't even accept donations anymore. Basically, nobody around here wants free books badly enough to come get them.

[emmalish]

Bummer! I'm lucky in that I have several big donation bins in my neighbourhood, two of which are for books. How about listing them on freecycle? Or put the entire collection up on craigslist for pick-up only. Some poor sucker will probably be only too happy to get the lot.

[Fat Guy]

A pick-up-only Craigslist post may be the endgame, after I've sold off everything that's worth selling. We'll see. As for donation bins and other drop-off options, until you've dealt with moving 2,000 books it's hard to grasp just how difficult it is to manage the volume and weight!

[Fat Guy]

It's also interesting to me how food books hold their value so well relative to most other kinds of books. There are some exceptions, like textbooks and technical books (those do fantastically well), but for the most part food books are the best thing to be selling on Amazon. If I go through a shelf of food books to see what's selling for a decent price, I can be sure that there will be several I can list for more than $5. If I go through a shelf of history-and-biography-type books, even if they're pristine hardcovers, I often find not a single book worth more than 99 cents in the Amazon marketplace.

[Sam Iam]

Steven, I just researched the word "cookbook" on Terapeak, the search engine for eBay. Over the last 90 days, over 180,000 cookbooks were listed, with a sell-through rate of 32%.

Top of the stack were cookbooks signed by Julia Child, and many older and rare books that went for hundreds each. Might be worth a look.

Regards,

Sam

[Sam Iam]

Searching on the key words "Julia Child signed" brought up 123 listings, $267 average sale, 83.7% sell through.

How's your penmanship?!?

[Fat Guy]

Just crossed the $500 (gross) mark today, and shipped our 36th book.

[CaliPoutine]

I once shipped a bunch of books [to Calipoutine, I think] because there was going to be a book sale at one of the gatherings. If something like that is coming up, perhaps that would also be something worth considering for books that aren't worth the effort of putting up for sale on Amazon.

This was a couple of years ago but I think it might have been the Heartland Gathering.

jayne

Yep, it was me. We sold them at the Cleveland gathering. We made a donation to the society and the church where we held the group meal. Thanks.

[Fat Guy]

Okay now here's one I thought for sure I'd get some money for. I have a copy of Heritage of Spanish Cooking, by Alica Rios, in barely-touched condition. It's an impressively proportioned coffee-table book that barely fits on my tallest shelf, 256 heavily photographed pages, 13.2 x 9.8 x 1 inches and weighing in at 4.2 pounds.

The going rate is $2.44. And it's not just that one joker has it on there for $2.44. There are many copies available that cheap. At that price, it's basically a break-even deal (or worse) just to get it out of the house.

[Fat Guy]

Time has not been kind to Lee Bailey's books. The man (who died in 2003) wrote many large-format, heavily-photographed books in the '80s and '90s. They're enjoyable books and I thought they'd be worth something because of their high production values -- they're borderline art books. Almost every one in my collection, however, can be had on Amazon for between 22 cents and $1.30.

Months later, we have finally sold the one Lee Bailey book that seems to be worth anything. Lee Bailey's Corn fetched ten bucks.

[runwestierun]

I recently sold a gob of books on Amazon and I packaged them to send in bubble wrap. My local appliance store was happy to give me a carload of it. They recycle their cardboard and hang on to that, but their appliances all arrive from the factory wrapped in bubble wrap inside the boxes. They gave me as much of that as I wanted.

So the bubblewrap is in big dishwasher or refrigerator shaped pieces with some tape on it, but it's free. I wrap the books in 3 layers of that and then wrap it in craft paper which was about $4 for a giant roll. That's the cheapest book packaging I've found. I used the USPS Media mail service, most books were under $3 to ship.