Purchasing a Bargain Book, Part 2
October 19th 2006 05:23
In Part 1, I covered Novels, Diet Books, and most self-help books. Today, we’ll wrap up with three more common types of books.
Popular Biographies tend to drop significantly. Most don’t sell as well as publishers expect, so you end up with a glut of books in the discount bin, which are then a lot easier to turn around and sell online at a further discounted rate. Biographies are like novels. They’re read once and rarely read again, so these have a large number of sellers. Former US President Bill Clinton’s “My Life” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “Living History” are available at Half.com for 75 cents each.
Another type of book is what I call the cult self-help book. I don’t mean cult in a bad way, but some books are known for actually providing extremely useful advice. As such, it’s very hard to get a discount, because it’s not like a novel, or just some book you read once and then throw away. A couple examples of books that are old, but have held an incredible amount of value are Dave Ramsey’s “Total Money Makeover” and Dan Miller’s “48 Days to The Work You Love.” Both books provide worksheets and detailed information that’s so valuable, that it’s a reference book. For these books, I’d search Half.com, Amazon, Overstock, and Froogle to get the best price. In this case, Half.com once again has the best price for Total Money Makeover at $12.00 while Overstock has the best price on 48 days to the work you love, beating the half.com price by a whopping 22 cents.
Textbooks are fairly easy to get online and I’d search Half.com, Amazon Marketplace, or Ebay to get the best deal possible. Every year, colleges have textbook buybacks where they purchase textbooks from students at a ridiculous discount, a very small percentage of the retail price. What the smart student does is sell them on Half.com or Amazon at a higher price than they could get, but a lower price than the school would charge. A smarter student goes ahead and skips the phase of being overcharged for the books in the first place and finds out what the books he’ll need are and what edition they are and purchases them online. The Edition number is very important because if you purchase the 8th edition and your teacher breaks out a brand new 9th, you could have some confusion in class.
The final type of book I’ll discuss is the reference book. A reference book is any book that you’re keep on hand for future use. It could be a recent Bible concordance or a home medical guide. Regardless, when you make a recent purchase of one of these books, you purchase them to use them not to sell them, so the price will drop less dramatically. Reference books will drop quite a bit once they’re out of date. For example, the 2005 World Almanac is available on Half.com for $0.75 while the 2006 edition is available for $5.99. Of course, the 2005 World Almanac is borderline useless at this point. For reference books, you’ll want to follow a procedure of checking Half.com/Ebay, Overstock and Amazon.com.
For older out of print books, Overstock’s not going to be much help, while Half.com and Ebay will provide your best bet.
I could go on for dozens of different types of books, but there are so many types, I couldn’t possibly list them. But in general, there are two categories of books:
1) Read Once books
2) Keep Books
The books you keep will be the hardest to find as “used book bargains” while the books you read only once will be easiest to buy. This also should inform your book buying decisions, as you know that the price of that novel you’ve got your eye on will drop like a rock in six months, while that reference book will most likely take so long to drop that it may be best to purchase it after only a month or two.
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