In case you haven’t heard yet, Borders Bookstores has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is closing and is closing around 200 of its 600+ stores across the country. The stores that are closing will be liquidating their inventory which means that some good deals can be found.

You can check this link for a list of Borders Store Closings to find one near you.

Due to some recent feedback from vendors on BookScouter’s feedback system, I’ve recently made a couple of minor modifications to the feedback page and the criteria that I use to approve feedback.

When a user is submitting feedback, the following text is now displayed at the bottom of the page:

Each feedback submitted is manually reviewed and approved before being displayed on the site. Ultimately, BookScouter may approve or reject feedback for any reason. We try to be as fair as possible and may not approve feedback for some of the reasons noted below:

• Vulgar or offensive language, including name-calling.
• Poor grammer, punctation, spelling, or the use of all caps.
• Comments not specificly related to the vendor for which it was submitted.
• Comments not related to selling back books.
• If we have reason to believe that a vendor is incentivising users to leave positive feedback for themselves or negative feedback for somebody else.
• Only one comment per user, per vendor is allowed. The most recent feedback will be displayed.

I also fancied up the page a little bit by adding a clickable-star selection instead of a drop-down box with numbers.

Finally, when submitting negative feedback for a Preferred vendor, users can have the option of having me contact the vendor on their behalf and try to have their complaint resolved directly. These are vendors that I believe provide good customer service and I will try to work with my contacts at these companies to ensure that BookScouter users have the type of positive experience that I expect.

Below are the top 100 books searched on BookScouter during January 2011.

The following table summarizes the top buyback sites during the months of December and January. Position is determined by the number of clicks that BookScouter users did to each site, which is a good indicator of how competitive each site’s pricing is during this busy season.

I get a couple dozen emails each week from people asking how much their books without an ISBN are worth. Unfortunately, the current is currently only useful for books with an ISBN. The ISBN obviously makes it easy to compare prices from multiple websites.

I’m looking at ways to tackle this problem of finding the value of non-ISBN books. However, I don’t have any experience valuating these types of books. I’d like to get in touch with a few book sellers who are knowledgeable about them and try to put something together. Please send me an email or use the Contact Form if you think that you can provide some insight.

The site had a bit of a jump in traffic over the last two days. I’ve had one email from somebody that noted learning about it on a television spot, so that seems to have been the cause. The extra traffic has caused a little bit of slowness on the site, but not anything too severe.

That is also the first mention of BookScouter on a television program that I’m aware of, so I’d be interested if anybody could provide any details, including what channel and market it was in, or a way to view it online.

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts
BookScouter.com

I’ve just finished adding FairBooks.com to the site so that their prices will show up when searching. BookScouter now compares prices from 44 different buyback vendors.