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Saturday, September 24, 2011

The Drawbacks to Book Buyback Programs

The Drawbacks to Book Buyback Programs

It's uncomplicated for me to rattle off a bunch of statistics about the expense of college textbooks from a university bookstore versus the online costs for the identical books, but to compare apples to apples, I looked up several books at present becoming needed for freshman courses at a university close to my own city. I located the typical price per book was $101.71 if bought from the university book store for a new book. The similar books if purchased new online would cost $71.67, and if bought online in "As New" condition would expense $57.33.

Therefore, a college student wanting to purchase new books online could save 29.5%, and if he/she were willing to accept "As New" books, which for all practical and aesthetic purposes are new books, he/she would save 43.6%.

Subsequent, I used among the online buyback internet websites to discover just how much they would pay for these books if I had them to sell. For the new books needed for a single freshman semester, that I would have to pay the university bookstore $712.12 to acquire, these buyback services would pay me $38.60. That's only five.4% of what I would have to pay for them. No wonder the invest in back services are so eager to buy college textbooks in the finish of each and every term and show up in numbers trying to entice college students to sell them their undesirable textbooks.

As an online bookseller myself, I know these varieties of margins are indeed realistic. I could be happy to give anybody $38.60 for some utilised textbooks that I knew I could resell for $500+ as made use of books too, but I do not show up on campus at the end of each term to benefit from college students.

Not only do these margins apply to college textbooks, they apply to other books too. A although back I purchased a copy of "Kate: The Kate Moss Book," by Kate Moss, ISBN 0789301016, for $0.49 at a employed book store. I sold the book online for $199.99, which is usually a nice profit. If I had opted to sell this book to among the buyback services I would have gotten $3.24 (I looked up the buyback cost immediately ahead of posting this write-up). Though acquiring something for $0.49 and selling it for $3.24 just isn't a poor profit margin, 561%, I see no reason to settle for a profit of $2.75 when I could wait a month and make a different $196.26, do you?

This really is exactly what thousands of college students do in the end of every term. They settle for a little bit of chump change for several beers when they could sell their undesirable textbooks online and get a lot additional for them by waiting some weeks. They could also save a great deal of funds by understanding about online bookselling and where to discover the best textbook costs and not pay full list price for every single book they obtain. Somewhat bit of time investigating online bookselling could certainly save the typical college student a whole lot of funds more than the course of their education.