If you can’t sell them – give them away

I have mentioned before that I actively sell books at Amazon.com. It started with two large boxes of teacher books that Mom had left over from her long and illustrious career. Since then, I’ve added to the sales inventory from the endless supply of books that mysteriously show up here at our house and through today have netted (after accounting for everything but my time and the trips to the post office) enough revenue to purchase 2 iPods (mine ships Thursday). Usually, when I describe the condition of the book I put “Book is in pristine condition. Read once by my wife, who then gave me the book to sell so I would quit griping about how many books she buys.” It seems to do the trick.

But there are some books I cannot sell – mass-market paperbacks, for instance. There’s just not enough profit margin. Or those books that have flooded the market and other volume sellers on Amazon are offering them for 1 cent, willing to earn only a few cents per book to maintain their volume status with Amazon.

So I give them away. The other day I picked up a card that referred me to BookMooch.com. The premise is simple; list books that you want to give away and are willing to send at your expense to someone else. In return, you can ask for (or mooch) books that others are willing to send you. It works on a point system – if you give away a book you earn a point. If you mooch a book it costs you a point. There’s a bit more to the point system than that, but not much. If you are willing to ship internationally, you get (and spend) more points.

Why would you want to go to the trouble of packaging up your books and taking them to the post office and spending good money to send them to Piscataway New Jersey? Why not take them to Half-Price where they will pay you oh, about .75 cents each for them? Actually the economy works this way; it will cost at most about $3 to package and ship a book and it can cost as little as $2. So you can get a new (to you) book for an outlay of $2 or $3 dollars. You can send a one pound book for $2.13 media mail rate. Even if you buy a fancy bubble wrap mailer your total cost is $3.00. A lot of paperbacks weigh only 7 or 8 ounces. Put them in a 12 cent manila envelope and send them First Class Large Envelope rate for a total of $1.92.

The down side? You go in the hole early on. You must list 10 books to begin and you will immediately get 6 or 7 mooch requests that you need to send. Then there is the problem that a lot of folks want the same books as you and you will end up pretty far down on the “wish list” for that book. Or if it is an old or obscure book, it may be a long while (if ever) before some one lists it. And then there is that trip to the post office.

But hey! If you don’t have anything better to do… What’s that? Yes, dear. Coming dear.