Frequently Asked Questions

What's this site all about?

There are many sites that buy used textbooks. The prices that these site offer vary widely though. In some cases, one sight may buy a book one or two dollars when another site might offer $20.00. Obviously, it is worth looking around to make sure that you are getting the most for your used books.
BookScouter.com makes this proess easy by quickly searching all of those sites for you. Our technology submits the ISBN to each of the sites, just like you would. It then displays the prices from all of those sites so you can see the range of offers and decide who you want to sell it to.

How do I find the ISBN number on my book?

The ISBN number is a 10 or 13 digit number usually displayed above or below a barcode. It is usually found on the front or back cover of a book, or sometimes on one of the first few pages. The ISBN number may have one or more hypyens, and it may end in an X

How do ratings work?

Anybody can leave feedback on this site to let others know of their experience with a vendor. If you have sold any books to any of these vendors, please leave feedback (good or bad) so that others know what to expect. An average of all of the ratings for a site is displayed using a 5-star system on many of the pages

What technology does this site use?

The web site is written in PHP using a custom framework developed by Brandon Checketts. The price scraper is written in Perl and uses LWP to fetch the pages and regular expresions to find the prices. A custom perl script is written for each site. The template for the website is available from opensourcetemplates.org. It also uses snap.com to display website previews.

I found a site that you aren't searching yet

Please let me know about it. The goal of this site is to be a comprehensive listing of all book buying sites.

I've got an idea that goes along with this site

I'd be interested in hearing about your ideas. Please fill out this quick form to let me know what you are thinking about.

Do you have a mobile version of the site?

I've considered investigating this and am interested in how many people are interested in having a mobile application that can be used to price books from thrift stores, yard sales, and other places. If you are interested in such a service, please Let me know using this form. I'm very interested in these possiblities and in working to make something that will work for you