It seems that students across the country are complaining about the rising cost of textbooks. However, we believe that students who buy and sell their books online can pay less for their books than ever before. There is more and more competition with companies who want to buy those used books. The competition is so fierce, in fact, that you can often sell a book back for almost as much as you paid for it. We’d like to gather some data from real students who are currently in college. If you are a student, or know a student, please submit the following:
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.
When it comes to selling books back at the end of the semester, some may settle for the bookstore’s low price because they don’t want to worry about it any longer. But for those of you who are willing to search around and find the highest price, Bookscouter.com is the place to go.
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.
At least one person per day asks how to sell their old or rare books. For these, Bookscouter.com is not able to provide vendors since there is no ISBN number associated with them. However we do provide alternate sources to find your books highest rated value.
I’ve just finished adding Amazon.com’s Textbook Trade-in prices to the site. The service is pretty new, and I’ve not heard much feedback about it yet. Beware that they offer payment ONLY through Amazon.com gift cards. My understanding is that they pay credit directly to your account, so I don’t know if there is any way to sell the gift card and convert it to cash. I believe that the buyback program is actually run by a third-party and not by Amazon directly