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.
Using BookScouter, you 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.
This is a great idea. I am wondering where does the approximate value of each book come from?
Also I think it might be wise to consider putting up a warning on the new page that says paper back swapping for profit is pretty strictly against their terms and conditions. I must admit that the idea of trading mediocre books for valuable books (to sell) did cross my mind at one point.
Tom, the approximate value is one of:
It may not be perfect, but it does a decent job of identifying which books warrant further investigation.
Mr. Scouter,
As far as warnings for paperbackswapping strictly for profit. I have to admit that it is fascinating to Bookscout (a new verb!) a page of Paperbackswap books to see which are most valuable.
I have done it a few times in the past few days, but haven’t actully done anything with it…
I hope that doesn’t get me banned! I consider this one big anthropological research exercise demonstrating the attentions of the public. It would be pretty cool to see a trend graph of the used price of a particular book. Here is the Google trend for “In Defense of Food” searches on Google: http://www.google.com/trends?q=in+defense+of+food&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0
I wonder what the graph of the USed price of In Defense of Food looked like…
Thanks for the distracting (albeit potentially profitable) tool!
Joe Barfield
San Antonio, TX