The sale of used books has undergone many changes in the last decade. It used to be a friendly, more personal effort when people interested in browsing books visited a used bookstore. Used book sellers hope that potential customers will be bibliophiles who will generate more business because they collect and invest in books. Though second-hand bookstores still grace malls and plazas, Amazon has become the internet’s great second-hand bookstore bully that the reader can count on to buy any book with a few clicks of an iPhone. Now, the name of the game is to make a quick buck by selling books on Amazon, not at your local used bookstore. Today, selling books has become a rat race for profit.
Today, selling used books has gone from reading and collecting to making a lot of money. These young sellers can make huge profits by paying to download the “Amazon Seller App” on their iPhones. This gives them access to Amazon, which instantly lists what they would pay for each book by scanning a book’s barcode and presto! – you can see the prices of the book on Amazon. Amazon offers an incentive to sell faster. It’s called FBA (“Fulfillment by Amazon”), which pays the seller immediately after sending a box full of books to the company. But many sellers on Amazon reported on YouTube the incredible amounts of money they made, while others reported less favorable financial experiences.
Although you may want a quick shot at easy money, you may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. As the saying goes, “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” Therefore, let us slow down this process and do not rush to go around in the books. What’s lost here is an appreciation for books, especially distinguished ones that are old and have been gathering dust for decades, even centuries. When I visit my faithful local Salvation Army, I don’t just look for trendy and sometimes popular books for profit. I search the rows for much older editions that might be valuable, because the staff overlooked them. Sometimes they are literary classics, sometimes they are not. Or the older books may be part of a set of volumes. A reputable bookstore that sells rare books may also have the entire set at a weekend garage sale.
For many old-school book buyers, collecting should be fun. Most sellers still buy used books at garage sales, church and library book sales, real estate sales, and of course used bookstores without the aid of a barcode reader. They enjoy the challenge of searching rows of shelves and tables for books that are appealing to the eye.
Also, finding books that may be rarer and more valuable is a result of taking the time to sift through rows of books. Buying books can become part of a personal reading library that can decorate a room with a few shelves full of books or one with shelves that reach the ceiling. What a great personal library communicates about its owner is culture, even education: a Renaissance man or woman. Books really can define a man or a woman, or as Marcus Tullius Cicero, the legendary ancient Roman philosopher, said: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
To join the book business, the book seller must be a book buyer, or he would not have any books to sell for profit. But the person who buys books can keep them without financial gain. Today, many young sellers come to the book sale armed with their Amazon seller gadgets and scan books as fast as they can to find books that add up to big profits. But to many book seekers, this seems in poor taste. Instead, the leisurely bibliophile searches for books to find those prizes that he buys to add to his collection or read in his spare time. When he is done enjoying his book, he can sell it for a profit.
It seems that Amazon’s bustling seller program with its relatively new seller app is a real source of profit for many who use it for maximum financial gain. Others object because the program didn’t work for them. Maybe if they want to sell used books, they can open a used bookstore, where fast money is replaced by a slower financial stream of income. To the Amazon seller, books are just objects that, when scanned for big bucks, fly off the table. To the bibliophile, books are like friends that never leave the shelf.