The following sites were the most popular sites last month, according to the number of visitors sent from BookScouter

1. Powell’s Books
2. Textbooksrus.com
3. BookJingle.com
4. Cash4Books
5. CKY Books
6. Book Byte
7. FirstClassBooks.com
8. SellBackYourBook.com
9. Textbooks.com
10. Blue Rocket Books

I’ve just finished adding Blue Rocket Books to the site. Their pricing should be showing up now, so please leave feedback for them as you have a chance to try their service. From what I’ve seen, it looks like they might purchase more fiction and other non-textbooks than many other sites.

Thank you to those who recently let me know about BookJingle. I have just finished adding it to the site and pricing should be showing up now.

I’ve noticed that a common complaint is for people to ship new books to a buyer only to have them graded as used. I believe that some of this is due to people packing books poorly and having them damaged in transit.

Can anybody share some hints for properly packing books for shipment? I’ve pointed people to this link on ebay before, but it seems like a bit of overkill. I’m hoping to compile some simple, practical steps that people can use to ensure that their books aren’t damaged in transit.

I imagine their might be some different things to consider when mailing individual books versus sending a box of books at a time.

Please post comments here, or email me your tips. I’m hoping to add a new page or two to the site with your input.

I have had a ‘hidden’ page available for a while where users can enter multiple ISBNs and look up approximate pricing for all of the books on one screen. That page is available at http://bookscouter.com/multi.php and available for anybody to use.

It works similarly to the Paperback Swap Lookup that I posted about recently. The pricing displayed is from the last time the book was looked up on the site, and it provides a link for you to refresh with the current prices.

I’m posting this here in hopes of gathering some feedback about how it works, and how you think it might be done better. As usual, feel free to comment here, or send me a message if you have any comments or suggestions.

PaperbackSwap.com is a great site for swapping books with other people. The intention is to make your books available to people, and you can ask for books from anybody else on the site. This works out pretty well and the service has grown a lot.

I have noticed that people occasionally post textbooks and other books that have a decent value. My guess is that the members don’t know that their books are worth anything, so they are willing to give them away in exchange for books that sell for a penny.

I have just created a page at http://bookscouter.com/pbs.php where a user can enter their PaperbackSwap MemberID and use their API to retrieve a list of their books. It then displays the approximate value of each book and provides links to look up the value of each book on BookScouter.

The page is pretty basic now, but if there seems to be any interest in it, I can spruce it up a bit. Please post comments here or Contact Me if you have any suggestions or comments.

I should have taken a hint when I noticed that I wasn’t getting some other emails, but something was broken on the server that prevented me from receiving emails generated from the site.

That has been fixed now, but I don’t have any way of retrieving those messages that have been submitted during the past month or so. My apologies to anybody whose message was lost.

Several people have notified me that Barnes and Noble’s pricing was not showing up on the site. It looks like they had changed the design of the site which broke the program that checked on their prices.

That has been corrected now, and Barnes and Noble’s pricing should be showing up correctly now.

I had somebody email me the other day about a cell phone recommendation, and I’m not sure how to reply. If anybody has a recommendation for which cell phone might work best for use while buying books, please comment.

I am in the market for a new cell phone and would like one that would allow me to scan book isbn #’s. I shop a lot of thrift stores and garage sales and believe some type of bar code scanner would be very helpful. Could you tell me what I need to look for in a phone?

I had a user ask me if I had any statistics that showed which of the merchants had offers on books the most frequently. This site records enough data to provide some interesting reports like that, so I took a little while to come up with it.

This graph shows the relative number of times that a vendor had a price for a title. The data goes back to the first of the year, so some of the vendors that were added since then show up lower than they normally would.

If you have some other type of report or graph that you might like to see, please comment with some details about what you are looking for, or send me an email and I’ll see if it is something that I can do.