By: Michael Mould
Several years ago the Internet opened up for book sales in a big way with the launch of Amazon.com. About the same time, Abebooks.com started a marketplace for the sellers of used books to make their
Several years ago the Internet opened up for book sales in a big way with the launch of Amazon.com. About the same time, Abebooks.com started a marketplace for the sellers of used books to make their
inventories available worldwide. Since then, an abundance of marketplaces have sprung up and there is no sign of the industry settling any time soon.
As a buyer of new and/or used books, you have many options available to you that didn't exist until recently. Historically, if you wanted a book you had to go to your local bookstore and college students had to buy all of their textbooks from their university bookstore. If your local bookstore did not have the book you wanted your only option was to order it and wait several months for it to arrive, and college students were at a real disadvantage if their university bookstore ran out of stock. Now, in most cases, the solution is as close as the nearest computer, and the book can usually be had within a few days, but for the uninformed Internet buyer, they will still be paying a premium price because they will only be looking for their book at the most popular marketplaces and passing up other marketplaces.
How do I know this? Because I have been an online bookseller for the past five years and have spent a lot of time researching the various marketplaces and the price variations among them. Since I am also an engineer and have a son working on his engineering doctorate right now, I am also keenly aware of the cost of college textbooks, particularly in the sciences. In fact, I coach online booksellers to be successful in their businesses, so I have to stay on top of the marketplace changes to know how to best react from a business standpoint.
Still, I have been surprised by the relatively small number of book buyers taking an interest in the seller end of the business. In almost every other consumer related business that I have ever been involved in, there were always consumers that wanted to completely understand how the sellers performed their business so that as consumers they would be able to buy at lower costs. This particularly baffles me where college students are concerned because they are the consumers of some of the most expensive books in the marketplaces, and it baffles me from two angles. First, it would seem that with relatively low wage incomes they would be interested in saving as much as possible on their textbook purchases, and secondly, most college students sell their unwanted textbooks at the end of the course and I would think they would want to get the most they could for them. Peripherally, I have to wonder why more college students are not more interested in making an income as online booksellers because they are already in one of the best positions for finding good books to sell. The only thing that allows me to rationalize them not getting into online bookselling is that they are
still students for a reason or they prefer flipping burgers for minimum wage.
Regardless, I really want to emphasize that if you are a consumer of books and find yourself buying the latest and greatest novel from your local chain bookstore, you really should investigate online bookselling from a seller's standpoint. If you understand how sellers operate online, you can save yourself hundreds of dollars every year. If you are a college student, you should be even more interested because the potential savings for you could be thousands of dollars every year and you just might be able to sell your unwanted textbooks for a profit when you finish with them.
The things an online bookseller knows about the marketplaces can be used by an online buyer as well, but only the ambitious are going to take the steps to optimize the scenario for themselves.
Michael E. Mould is the author of "Online Bookselling: A Practical Guide with Detailed Explanations and Insightful Tips," [Paperback ISBN 1427600708, CD-ROM ISBN 1599714876] and developer of "Bookkeeping for Booksellers," [CD ISBN 1427600694] a 19 sheet linked and tabbed Excel Workbook designed to assist online booksellers with the calculation of their in-state retail sales tax obligations and the preparation of their Schedule C tax forms. "Bookkeeping for Booksellers" also provides 55 integrated graphs to visually show an online bookseller just how their business is performing.
If you would like to learn more about saving money buying books online, or making money selling books online, please visit:
www.online-bookselling.com
or send Mike an email at:
mike@online-bookselling.com
