I am an absolute bookworm. I love to read and when I get into the right mood, I plow through books as though every literary genius in the world has just come down with writers block and there will be no more.

For a long time, I hoarded the books that I read. I also kept all of my textbooks, picked up free books when I saw them, and bought inexpensive books at yard sales and in used bookstores. After moving a few times, I realized that I was lugging around all of these books that I had already read, didn’t love that much, would never read again, and would likely not lend to anyone. I decided it was time for a major purge.

The first step was to separate out the books I wanted to keep. If I had absolutely loved the book and I thought I would want to read it again, or perhaps loan it to a friend, I let it keep it’s little home on my one bookshelf. Then I pulled out all of the books that I had picked up that I had not actually read. This was a great learning experience because I ended up having about 65 books that I hadn’t read but wanted to.

The remaining books would then be sold.

Selling Books Online

There are two major places to sell books on the Internet; www.half.com and www.amazon.com. Both are great options. With Amazon, you can’t really do a big bulk listing; you can only enter one book at a time, though I believe more people use this method to buy used books. Half.com does allow you to enter bulk items and the uploading process is faster, though I don’t feel as though you get quite the exposure that you want. Both stores do give you a shipping credit. This is especially good for textbooks, though I have offloaded many paperbacks this way too. You can certainly list your inventory on both sites, in the hopes of better exposure, but do be careful to keep track of your inventory in case you sell out on one site and then accidentally sell the same book on the other.

Used Book Stores

In some areas, you might be lucky enough to find a used bookstore that actually does purchase books. Most of the time, you’ll just find stores that will offer you a store credit, or trade. For used bookstores that do actually offer cash, most of the time they will be looking for newer textbooks and paperbacks. Older textbooks that have new editions out or hard covers that have since been released in paperback are usually not their priority. Often you’ll be offered a higher amount in store credit or a smaller percentage in cash. Honestly, you will probably be offered very little cash, but if you have books that simply haven’t sold online and you’ve given it a while, or your rent happens to be due, it can certainly be worth trying.

Paperback Swap

If you’d rather just trade in your library, www.Paperbackswap.com is for you. You list the books you with to part with, and then other people can request that you send them that book. Once they receive it, you then get a “credit” that you can spend on the site to request a book from another swapper. The benefit of this is that you can essentially stop purchasing books and all you are paying for is the cost of Media Mail shipping, which is less than $3. It can take a week or so for a book to reach you, but the inventory of books is quite huge. If you’ve got a few books that you just can’t seem to sell, you could also post them on there and see if you can end up trading them out for a more sellable item.

Got any other creative ideas of how to turn your books into cash?