I’ve just finished adding two new vendors to the site, bringing to total number of searchable sites up to 43.

Moola4Books is a company based out of Fort Wayne, Indiana that has been buying and selling books since 2008. The initial pricing that I’ve see looks like these guys have pretty competitive pricing.

Buyback101.com is based out of Florida and specializes in K-12 books, so they may buy some of those books in quantities that other textbook companies won’t.

I’ve had a good amount of communication with both companies prior to getting them enabled today. Both seem very eager to provide excellent customer service and to provide accurate and prompt payments. I’d encourage you to give them a try when you see the opportunity. And please remember to leave feedback once you have completed a transaction or two.

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts
BookScouter.com

• Multi-book lookup
  • Use this page to look up prices for multiple ISBN’s at a time.
  • OR insert the URL of a web page and we will look up any ISBN’s found on that page
• Historic Buyback Price Lookup
  • This searches for all past price lookups for the given ISBN. It includes results from all vendors and displays the maximum price found on each day.
• Recently Searched High Value Books
• Paperback Swap Bookshelf Value
  • When you enter a URL, the system will fetch that URL and then look for anything that appears to be an ISBN. Often times it finds things that look like an ISBN which actually aren’t
• BookProspector Price Lookup
  • You can use this page to look up multiple prices from BookProspector.com’s site. Enter your bookprospector username and password, and and email address where the results will be sent.

The following sites were the most popular in May and June 2010 according to the number of visitors sent from BookScouter. This is a good indication of which websites offered the highest prices during the month.

1. Textbooksrus.com
2. Powells Books
3. Amazon Buyback
4. FirstClassBooks.com
5. Textbooks.com
6. Sellbackyourbook.com
7. Cash4books.com
8. BookByte.com
9. CKYbooks
10. Better World Books

I had previously been running the mobile site and the iPhone application off of an older server. That server had some problems yesterday and the mobile site was down for some period of time until I got that fixed this morning. I have had plans to move those pieces over to the newer servers, but the problems from yesterday gave it the urgency needed to get that done. The good news is that the mobile site and iPhone apps now use the same infrastructure as the main websites which is more scalable and reliable. Additionally, some of the newer vendors which weren’t available on those platforms are now available as well.

I apologize for the inconvenience caused by those being inaccessible, but they should be working well now along with some other fixes that have been planned as well.

Thanks,
Brandon Checketts
BookScouter.com

What is it for, and where did it come from?

W. H. Smith, who was the largest single book retailer in Great Britain, became computerized and wanted a standard numbering system for all the books it carried. They constructed the Standard Book Numbering system (SBN), it was introduced in 1967. In 1970 the ISO, International Organization for Standardization, which consisted of several countries, adopted this standard system. It then became the ISBN numbering system and is now the standard in approximately 150 countries.

The books that were published prior to 1970 do not have ISBN numbers. These books may be rare and antique. But, just because they are labeled this does not mean that they are valuable. The most basic of our economic terms help us dictate the value of such books, supply and demand. A book found in abundance with little desirability to collectors will normally be worth less than a book that is scarce and in high demand. The demand for less common and more desirable books drives the price up. If you are looking to sell your rare or antique books then look to Abebooks.com or Powellsbooks.com . These are both great places to sell them, or to just price the books. If you think that the books may be of more value than these sites give you then you could try finding an ABBA (Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association of America) near you.