How has the used book market changed?

[bitsofsiliconvalley]

I have a question about the eBay market for used books.

Years ago I was reselling a lot of used books that I purchased at library sales. Typically I'd list a book in a 7-day auction with a starting bid about half the average price in the same condition on ABEbooks. I'd sell about 50% of the listings, which I considered satisfactory.

I dealt mainly in technical books on odd and obscure topics that a person with a related occupation or hobby might want to buy for use. I also sold collectible books that would appeal to the same type of people. Here are a couple of representative listings that I have right now:

Designing and Painting for the Theatre, Pecktal - HB

Design Guide to Orbital Flight, Forward by Wernher von Braun, 1962

I've been away from eBay for three years, and away from selling books for years longer. Now I'm trying to liquidate the books I have on hand. I'm listing and pricing things the same way I used to, and nothing is selling. What has changed? What do I need to do to get a reasonable sellthrough rate?

[lacemaker3]

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@2013grotz wrote:

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@lacemaker3 wrote:

I private messaged them, and asked them to send me reasonable counter offers. "No, my wife set the prices and I can't accept those offers." So, no logical reason for it, just "Wifey says no.".

It's interesting just to see how wide the variance is of price setting between sellers on the same item on ebay.

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I would have liked to purchase all the books from the one seller (in the USA), as they had the whole set of books I was interested in. I wanted to support them and give them the business, even though they were not the lowest price seller on all of them, because they had all of the books, and most sellers had only one or two. It was more convenient, and I could save on shipping costs by purchasing from one seller. Their prices started at $7.00, most were in the $20's, and the highest was $100.00.

I purchased the book they had priced at $100.00 from a UK seller instead, for about $27.00 including shipping and sales tax.

[maxine*j]

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

... My take is that people should be paying good money for many of the books I'm selling because the information in them just isn't available anywhere else. Two examples plucked out of my memory, sold many years ago... 

... My own theory is that a lot of the lack of response is due to the way eBay classifies things..   No hope of finding something that interests you unless you're searching for a particular title...

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You asked what has changed, and then talk about your experiences "many years ago" as though they were what it relevant.

Many years ago, reference work were only just beginning to be digitized wholesale and made available for reading or downloading at no cost.  Now, this is common.  Universities, institutions such as NASA, and even private hobbyists offer huge .pdf libraries.  If you search the web, you'll find the .pdf of the theatre design book you have listed, for example.  (I didn't check any other listings.)

Many years ago, the Print-on-Demand business was just emerging, with people buying books in the public domain or books with the rights for sale cheap, digitizing them, and printing copies as they sold.  Now, this is common.

Many years ago, people had little choice in format.  It was physical books or nothing.  Now, they have choices:  "Traditional" books, POD books, digitized books, audio books.

As for blaming eBay for its eliminating most of the subcategories in books, very few people looking for technical and reference books randomly browsed an entire subcategory.  They did then, and they do now, search specifically for what they want.

I'm not trying to discourage you from selling your library of reference and technical books on eBay.  I am saying that you cannot expect quick sales of these books.  You need to be willing to list and re-list and re-list until you get a sale.  These are not fast nickel books.  They are very slow dime books.

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[2013grotz]

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

First, for some of these items I simply can't find comps; the only alternative to blind guessing is to let the market set the price.

There's always some sort of guidance somewhere.  For example, I see 11 copies of the first thing you listed for sale right now and 1 copy that sold a couple of months ago.  For the second, I see 4 copies up for sale.  Of course, you can go on Terapeak and find data for two years back or there's other sites.  There's always a way to figure out what people are willing to pay for anything.

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

Second, my life has gotten very busy, and I can't run to the Post Office whenever someone decides to buy a book ... If I've got a bunch of BIN listings I don't have that option. Maybe eBay has a vacation setting...

There is a vacation setting, but again you have to look at the buyer on things.  The buyer has largely spoken out against auctions, and this is probably the biggest thing keeping you from sales that you can fix.  Buyers also happen to expect prompt shipping times.  As for the "my life is very busy" excuse, tons of people make it work as has been testified on many comments here.  In fact, if you go electronic postage, you can just print it out, affix it to your package and drop it off anytime (most places) instead of having to wait in a line and pay up front.  There's always a way.

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

It concerns the idea that people just aren't going to pay money for books that contain old information.

@maxine*janswered that very well.  Information is always out there somewhere and if people want it they'll find it.  Now for what you posted, if anyone wants them it's going to be for collector's value, not for any interest in reading the book for the information.  Like I said earlier, people will care about condition in that regard and hopping onto Terapeak for "solds" on one of those books bears it out.  They paid about four times what you're charging for yours, but all the copies were in pristine shape - i.e. they cared about the condition immensely.

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

My take is that people should be paying good money for many of the books I'm selling because the information in them just isn't available anywhere else . . . Two examples plucked out of my memory, sold many years ago: an early 1950s edition of a annual guide to repairing popular brands of cars; a copy of the RCA vacuum tube reference manual from the 1960s. If you're interested in one of those topics you'll find scraps of the same information on the Web, but you'll never find all of it, certainly not in one place. If this is unrealistic, please help me understand why!

This underscores a good example of something I sold.  I picked up a nice 1960's era VW bug owner's manual and sold it pretty quickly for a nice amount of money.  They didn't want it for the information at all - in fact a lot of these "old" things you reference have Clubs and things of the sort where all the members take great interest in stockpiling such information.  The buyer didn't need the information, so what did they want it for?  People restore such vehicles and want them to appear as they did when they were in the showroom new.  Original is key, but they just cared for the manual being there in good shape.  Again collector's interests.  If they were interested in the information, they could do as @maxine*j suggests and hit any number of PDF stockpiles.

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

As for condition, accurate descriptions are important, but less-than-perfect condition shouldn't deter a buyer much; first, because they want the information, not the paper and binding

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Covered up above.  Overall, you posted like you were looking to find out things about the market and many people that have more recent and accurate knowledge than you professed responded, but given this response it seems you already have your mind made up.  As I hinted up above as well, the purpose of this isn't to go off of your own assumptions of what you want or think is valuable, but provide the buyer what they will respond to.  We've told you, pretty much, what that is.  Of course, you can agree or disagree, but on some level we do know what's going on.   Like @maxine*j says, I hope you do well and sell all of your stuff, but books generally won't sell all that quickly, especially to facilitate auctioning them.  You might have to wait months or years for them to go.  This will be especially true with most books that are in beaten up condition, especially when there's pristine copies readily available.  In the end, you might have to put a lot lower selling cost than you think for them to finally move.

[monster-deals]

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@bitsofsiliconvalley wrote:

What has changed? 

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I've been selling books since 1994.

The days of buying bulk boxes of books and making a go of it is over in this supersaturated market. Long gone is the free money windfall of selling just about any book for half.

The average seller that sits at Goodwill or a church sale scanning all day does not need to know a single thing about books. No knowledge, no expertise and they are able to compete with you.

Sellers doing well are buying by the truckload and making pennies but extensive volume or ones that actually know books and can obtain rare volumes and have a target audience.

[gwens*4saleitems*]

I was simply replying to the post that stated Barnes & Noble was closed.  

As far as distance goes, a trip of 100 miles is roughly 1 1/2 - 2 hours (depending on how fast you drive) an hour to shop, and 2 hours back home that's hardly a "day vacation" plus, you are free to shop online any time .... 😉

[bitsofsiliconvalley]

Quite  few ideas here. Some I think are good, others questionable; I want to thank everyone for their participation.

One comment was so much against my experience that I have to respond: the person who said of my concern about too-frequent trips to the Post Office: "As for the "...very busy" excuse... you can just print [the label] out, affix it to your package and drop it off anytime."

That is exactly what I do. That is exactly what I can't afford the time it takes to do every day or two.

According to Google Maps, my home is a four minute drive from my neighborhood Post Office. Add four more minutes to get to my car, multiply by two for the round trip, and add two more minutes for going into the Post Office; to "drop it off anytime" turns out to take 18 minutes. Add another five minutes to wrap up whatever I'm doing before I leave, and at least 15 minutes to get back into it when I return, and the trip now costs me 38 minutes.

But it gets worse. Listing auctions with a known end time, I can plan to go to the Post Office one or two fixed days of the week, week in and week out. When I have other trips to make, I can plan to make them at the same time. I can turn "drop it off anytime" into a side trip that adds ten minutes or less to another trip that I have to take anyway. If I have to visit the Post Office whenever someone buys a book, I can't take do that except when two trips fall on the same day by sheer chance. Each trip to the Post Office actually costs me 38 minutes or more, instead of 10 minutes or less.

Another person said, "you have to look at the buyer on things," meaning, I think, I have to look at things from the buyer's point of view. No, that's the buyer's job; I have to look at the thing from my point of view. For me, the question is not what I have to do to persuade the buyer to please, pretty please, buy my books? The question is whether the things I'd have to do to persuade the buyer buy my books are worth doing.

I don't want to do this, but there's a point beyond which I'll come out ahead if I donate everything back to the library sale instead of trying to sell it on the buyer's terms. I just have to decide whether there's a way to bring selling with fixed price listings onto the near side of that point.

[anjofak]

What left here is 85% lamest. Was the number 4 top seller a year or so ago guess they fixed it

[chapeau-noir]

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@mike_jayroe wrote:

I have a lot of books listed, mostly NASCAR and railroad related and haven't sold any since early March. I have a lot of paperback books (Dale Brown / Tom Clancy and a lot of non-fiction books ) on another site for over 9 months and have sold only two of them.

Like others have said above, e-books seem to be preferred. I like the old style books where I can read anywhere I want since I don't have a lap top and I don't need to keep a battery charged.

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It might not even be eReaders - for instance, mass market paperbacks of best sellers are so numerous that you can pick them up at the thrifts for a quarter, a dime or for free in a bin out front - no one is going to actually purchase one online unless they can't find it, and I have found best sellers in the most obscure thrifts. A great many books end up remaindered - people buy them cheap and try to sell them online, but no one wanted them to begin with. It's kind of a mess. (I used to sell books).

[anjofak]

Sold tons via auctions, last year..

Flat line sales blahhhhhh😱💀guess some just don't have the winning spirts..just the latter..

[femmefan1946]

As a returning seller are you registered with Managed Payments?

You need your SSN and a checking account in a US-based bank. Many sellers are setting up standalone accounts with low fee, online banks.

Your customer payments will be held for up to 30 days against your performance, so use that time to set up something eBay can transfer your earning to.

[femmefan1946]

I used to go to work on the bus.

At the turn of the millennium, about half the riders were reading books or newspapers. Another 25% or so were listening to various radio or music devices.

By the time I retired, less than 10% of riders were reading, and most of those were still the daily paper. The others had Kindles or other e-readers, or were reading on their phones.

No observable drop off in actual reading, but fewer and fewer books.

I have switched to selling mostly sewing and knitting patterns.

[femmefan1946]

@2013grotz
Does the USPS not have any mailboxes any more?
I keep seeing references to going to the Post Office and lining up, which is a drag, but  I have a mailbox with a 9am pickup at the end of my block and another two blocks away with a 3pm pickup. Most of my packages can just be dropped in the slot, especially if I have printed off the label at home.

I did have to go to the PO today, and line up, but only because I had two Registered Domestic items to send and those labels are not available online.

Please explain to this baffled Canadian.

[2013grotz]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

Does the USPS not have any mailboxes any more?
I keep seeing references to going to the Post Office and lining up, which is a drag

Basically how this works in the US: Most every address has a personal box of some kind which any incoming mail comes in.  Like if someone get sent mail, or orders something the person making the rounds will bring them to their mailbox or in cases of bigger items, their door. 

Now for outgoing mail, the same person will pick up any letters one has to send by putting it in the mailbox and setting the flag.  But for parcels, say, someone buys something off ebay, the seller can't simply just put it in their mailbox with the correct postage like the letter.  One could schedule a pick up at their door, where they would have to be there to hand off the packages.

But what most would have to do, they would have to take the parcel to the post office in order to mail it.   If they don't have postage, they'd have to go through the line and buy it.  If they print it online and affix the paper/label to the package, they can drop it into the parcel bin as long as the lobby is open (most cases 24/7).  There are blue public mailboxes about much like you describe, but their slots are only as big as a small stack of letters, which I assume is to limit them to letter-class stuff only.  I could drop small bubble parcel mailers into those slots, but I get the idea from the bins inside the post office itself that they probably wouldn't like that.

Of course, the issue of doing this is a bigger issue with distance.  Like I mentioned to OP, given their very overstated estimates, there have been many people who have posted here that mentioned they do make it work.   The main corrective for OP, or any seller given how USPS parcel handling works is to plan specific times to make these trips and set their handling policies around this time.  Of course, buyers might avoid sellers that sit on their sales for an extended period of time, but that's a risk the seller would have to take in the question of whether they sell their stuff or not.

[2013grotz]

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@femmefan1946 wrote:

Does the USPS not have any mailboxes any more?
I keep seeing references to going to the Post Office and lining up

I made a rather detailed explanation of options for mailing USPS parcels, but I don't see that it posted.  That said, we have mailboxes like you describe but generally only for letters.  Like for me, if I sell something I have to either schedule someone to come and take it from me when I'm here, or as most do have to go to the Post Office with it.  If I do the online postage, I can drop it in a parcel drop there without having to get in line.  But if you have postage you have to get in line (generally).  But one still has to make the trip, which is what OP was talking about in Post #36.  Of course, any seller works out how to do this and tunes their shipping policies accordingly as far as handling time goes.

[bitsofsiliconvalley]

Packages with computer printed postage cannot be put in mailboxes in the U.S. They must be taken to the post office. I don't know whether the Post Office will pick them up; it's an option I haven't investigated, because it would require the pickup person to call me to bring a package out to the gate, and I don't think they would. Also they won't pick up Media Mail packages, i.e. almost all domestic book sales.

If you put stamps on your packages (and put up with retail rates rather than discounted business rates) you can put packages in mailboxes. That's assuming they fit into the chute. Most of the things I sell, including some books, would not. It also assumes they weigh less than a pound. The Post Office requires all heavier packages to be brought in so they can identify the shipper if the package turns out to contain a bomb.