I’ve noticed that a common complaint is that some people have shipped 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 link on ebay before, but it seems like 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 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.

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 at 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.