Who has the time to compare dozens of buyback vendors for a pile of ISBNs when you just want to be done and have your space freed up? We did the work for you and have a recommendation.
You have a stack of books staring you in the face and you're trying to do your spring cleaning. You don't have a barcode reader, and you don't want to spend all day comparing prices on books that you just want to get rid of.
Isn't there a single place that you can go, and be relatively assured that the price you're getting for your books is about the best price out there? We took a random photo of a random internet person's bookshelf and ran through their ISBNs and tried to find out just that for you.
The first step was just finding a bookshelf full of normal-looking books. I think we've done that. I think that these are representative of how most people buy books. They buy the authors they like and they buy within a genre generally. So starting from the left, we used Bookscouter to compare the buyback prices of the books on the shelf. We only checked the first book by any given author, and if it was difficult to determine the ISBN or anything, we just skipped it. It turned out perfectly because at the right-hand edge of the bookshelf, we reached the number 10 and I think we reached a conclusive answer.
What we were looking for was a price that was always near the top of the comparison, and was also generally buying back everything. When you're trying to get rid of books, you want to get rid of them -- you don't want to be left with a second decision to make as you're moving through the stack. So even if it's 10 cents or something you just want to pack one box, you just want to label one shipment, you just want to be done -- one trip to post office.
So with that out of the way, here are the results. The first line is the ISBN and the book, the next lines are the comparisons of the prices offered as of March 24th 2020
0571295215 Sylvia Plath: Drawings Frieda Hughes
SellBackYourBook $5.09
Ziffit $2.30
TextbookManiac $1.74
ValoreBooks $0.61
Cheaper College Books $0.58
1982110996 The Perks of Bring a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky
BooksRun $2.71
SellBackYourBook $1.92
Ziffit $1.31
000721684X The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion
Ziffit $0.66
SellBackYourBook $0.18
0743289463 The Collected Stories Amy Hempel
SellBackYourBook $0.11
0316769177 The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
TextbookRecycling $0.93
SellBackYourBook $0.35
SellBackBooks $0.25
eCampus $0.25
BlueRocketBooks $0.20
1573220485 The Beach Alex Garland
SellBackYourBook $0.11
1417664681 Choke Chuck Palahniuk
SellBackYourBook $0.18
0316143472 When You Are Engulfed in Flames David Sedaris
SellBackYourBook $0.12
033044798X The Rules of Attraction Bret Easton Ellis
SellBackYourBook $0.18
0393304515 Civilization and its Discontents Sigmund Feud
TextbookRecycling $1.56
BlueRocketBooks $1.25
SellBackBooks $1.00
eCampus $1.00
Ziffit $0.84
SellBackYourBook $0.58
As you can see, the prices are all over the map. Some of the books weren't being purchased anyway, and some of the buyback companies appear on only a few books. But what is very clear is that SellBackYourBook beats everyone on coverage. And in many instances they are also the best price.
It's a relatively simple thing to determine that SellBackYourBook is the winner here. If you were going through a box of 50 books and trying to clear out your stuff, and you just restricted yourself to SellBackYourBook and made it one step, you would save a ton of time. And your time is worth money and these books are not likely going to be worth all the time. Think of it as recycling and getting a couple of bucks for it.
If it were me, I would set my books down, type the ISBNs into any text editor, go to SellBackYourBook, go to the homepage, click on 'Bulk Enter ISBNs', and paste them in there. See what you've got on your hands. There really is no faster way, and no better fast way, to get rid of a bunch of books quickly. The reviews for SellBackYourBook are reasonable and they've been around a while. I would feel comfortable sending my books to them.
The alternative is to compare the values of all your books, donate the ones that aren't worth selling back, set aside the valuable ones, and list those on Amazon. It takes a lot of time, takes a lot of trips to the post office. If you have enough books it can be worth it (your books can be worth $40-$50 easily) but for most people, you just want to be done. And the time itself is worth more than the entire bookshelf is worth.
You're going to get space back, you're not going to waste much time, and you're not going to be just throwing things in the garbage. It's a win-win-win, and we in this case we recommend SellBackYourBook.com