What Books To Get

Selecting books for resale on the Internet has become more and more difficult in a very short time. As recently as October of 2000, one could post a nice hardcover copy of Barry Sears’ The Zone online for $15 and be virtually guaranteed it would sell within 48 hours. Best-selling mass market paperbacks could be sold quickly for half their cover price, or $3.75, and popular trade paperbacks would bring $7 to $10 with rapid turnover.

Not any more. In March 2002 there are 137 copies of The Zone available on Amazon’s Marketplace and 417 available at Half.com; the market for a very good copy of the book on Amazon is under $8, and on Half.com it is under $3. The best selling mass market paperbacks are selling for a penny on Amazon and the 75-cent minimum at Half.com, and many very good, popular trade paperbacks have seen their online price market fall to the $1 to $4 range.

Yet despite these signs of market saturation in some titles, many sellers are doing just fine selling books online. What’s their secret? It’s definitely not a matter of ignoring the downward price spirals and listing the same books at higher prices in hopes that buyers will rise to meet them. Dream on.

No, the secret is no secret at all. The successful sellers are the ones who manage to find books that are still relatively uncommon or scarce and get them inexpensively. Are we talking rare? No. Rare and antiquarian books certainly continue to have a flourishing market, but it can be a tough market to buy in, because there is a lot of competition from other, very savvy book dealers.

A New Set Of Categories

In order to make the point a little more clearly, let’s come up with a new set of categories for used books: hyper-common, outdated, common, uncommon, scarce, and rare. Here’s what we can say about each of these somewhat arbitrary categories. (But bear with me as I try to provide anecdotal examples of each category, because the specifics are bound to change very quickly, and the particular titles, sales rankings, and price markets cited here will be – speaking of outdated – yesterday’s news).

Hyper-common books are books that have already saturated the new-book market with huge printings based on the guaranteed sales associated with names like John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, and Stephen King or with the imprimatur of an Oprah selection or perhaps even a mention by Don Imus. As used mass market paperbacks, their retail price market is usually less than a dollar, and sometimes less than a dime, and is likely to stay there, with occasional exceptions. Nice trade paperback versions may bring as little as a dollar or two, and most hardcover copies won’t bring much more. One kind of exception is that there will often remain a pretty good market for very good to fine first edition hardcovers in fine dustjackets, provided that they are listed as collectibles. Amazon’s Marketplace condition and category structure allows these fine or near fine modern first editions to be sold as collectible at a minimum price one penny above the list price for the book, so that a “collectible” first edition of Grisham’s The Partner, for instance, can be listed at any price from $26.96 up. So, it’s worth picking up such modern first editions if they are in very good or better condition, but otherwise stay away from hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and mass market paperbacks in this category.

While I have focused on fiction authors as the easiest examples of hyper-common books, there are plenty of non-fiction examples. We found 276 trade paperback copies of Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People available on Amazon’s Marketplace, with a market price under $5, when the book was ranked in the top 100 in new book sales. There’s a market glut beginning to happen, and in all likelihood the used book price will dip down to a dollar or so when demand tapers off a bit or a revised edition hits the shelves. In addition to heavily sold business titles, another category that seems to saturate the market is books by comedians. Books by very funny people like Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser and Ellen DeGeneres are obviously helpful in complementing the meager day-job earnings of their authors, but in most cases they won’t do much for your earnings.

The economics of the publishing industry work very differently for fiction than for non-fiction. Of the more than 125,000 new titles published institutionally each year, fewer than 10 per cent are fiction. Of these fiction titles, the overwhelming majority of actual copies printed are novels, mysteries, and romances by a relatively small number of authors whose track record has made them guaranteed best sellers. Publishers spend huge marketing budgets on them, and they tend to pay off not only with big hardcover sales but also by selling the rights to the mass market paperback editions, the trade paperback editions, the book club editions, the audio book editions, the films, the film tie-in editions, and the foreign editions. These books begin with six- and seven-figure print runs, become hypercommon, and their used copies glut the online markets.

Non-fiction books and fiction books by novelists who have not proven themselves best sellers, on the other hand, tend to get much smaller print runs and marketing budgets. In the case of non-fiction how-to books, they also tend to be coveted by people who desire the specific expertise available between their covers, which means that they tend to hold their value if they are not over-printed or outdated. One important exception to watch out for involves non-fiction books that go through regular revisions. For instance, the 1997 mass market paperback edition of Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution was one of Amazon’s top self-help best sellers in 2001 and would probably still be good for two or three bucks used, but for the fact that Dr. Atkins came up with some new things to say (we assume) and published a “Revised and Improved” mass market paperback edition in December 2001. As a result, at this writing a few months later there are 334 copies of the older and less improved edition available on Amazon’s Marketplace, with half a dozen listed at a penny and dozens more listed at less than four bits. A similar dynamic, of course, is usually at work with computer books, especially software guides that have the potential to make you dizzier than Dan Rather in a West Texas twister if you start trying to keep track of whether version 5.1 or 7.7 or 2001 is the most current software available.

But probably worst of all, among outdated books with which you will want to avoid spinning your wheels, are previous editions of textbooks. It has likely happened to every new and hopeful book dealer: you find a big, thick, heavy, pristine textbook, printed in 1999, at a library sale or garage sale for a buck. The list price is $72.50 and you can’t wait to get it home to offer it to some poor, starving student for the bargain price of $36.25! But when you go to list it you learn there is just one small problem – there’s a new edition just printed, so your only chances at selling it will be either (a) to hope that some dunce will get the edition wrong and buy your copy, with the likely result that the kid will get in trouble for having the wrong edition and then come back to you sheepishly, at best, apologizing for his mistake and asking for a refund; or (b) listing it fraudulently as if it is the new edition, which will definitely lead to a refund request that will be anything but sheepish! Truth is, I usually pick up good-looking relatively recent textbooks when I find them for a buck or less, because if one out of four is a current edition and I donate and deduct the other three, it’s a significant net gain.

Common books are titles that will always be readily available to the online buyer because they were heavily printed, but they are not so ubiquitous that you’ll find dozens of very good copies available for less than a dollar each. Chances are you can make money on them – an average of two to five dollars per sale for paperbacks -- but not enough to thrive at your business if they are the only things you are selling. Buy them when can get them for a quarter apiece, but adhere to very strict condition standards of “Very Good” or better. Popular non-fiction books often fit this category, especially self-help and recovery titles, but when I try to think of examples one group that comes to mind involves what I will call older contemporary serious fiction such as the works of J.D. Salinger, May Sarton, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Ken Kesey, Saul Bellow and the pre-1980 works of John Updike, Philip Roth, and Larry McMurtry. Another group whose books are common includes some of my own favorite contemporary writers such as Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Carl Hiaasen, and Sue Miller who are commercially successful but not at the megastar level of the Kings and the Clancys. Finally, one group of common books for which there will always be reasonably good demand are the classics of college literature courses by authors such as Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, William Faulkner, and so forth.

Uncommon books are probably where you’ll make your money, the more so as you develop your instincts for what to buy. They are not to be found in every single brick-and-mortar bookshop you will ever enter and, while there some copies available online, there are few enough that there is relative balance between supply and demand and the price has not spiraled downward. On the other hand, these books are not by any means scarce, and it is doubtful you will sell them with inflated prices. The price market for very good used copies is likely to be somewhere near or just slightly below half of the current list price. Among fiction authors, for just about any popular author, you will find examples of titles that are hyper-common, common, and uncommon:

· Most of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall novels, along with a few other books like Poodle Springs and All Our Yesterdays, are hyper-common or common and have online price markets, for very good used copies, ranging from a penny to, say, $1.50. Parker’s very interesting and somewhat eccentric early novel Love and Glory has tended to be uncommon, with a price market in the $3.50 to $5 range, although the price may have dipped by as much as a dollar recently. The 1994 coffee table book Spenser’s Boston on which Parker collaborated with photographer Kasho Kumagai is scarce, though far from rare, and its price market hovers around $100.

· Some of the Toni Morrison novels that have seen numerous book club edition printings, such as Jazz, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon, were hyper-common for a while and their price markets dipped ell below a dollar. However, very interestingly, they have recovered somewhat to the $1 to $3 range more recently, so that I would rank them as common and note that this regrouping seems to suggest some growing bookseller savvy about avoiding market gluts until prices have stabilized a bit.

· Morrison’s Sula has just been named an Oprah selection, and perhaps Oprah’s last selection, at this writing, and one can therefore expect that for several months its will be uncommon and its price market will rise toward the $5 to $10 range, after which it will fall dramatically as the truckloads of copies purchased after Oprah’s anointing will hit the used market and become common again.

· As I write this, the phenomenal early success of Rebecca Wells’ debut novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, which later led to its availability for pennies on Amazon Marketplace, is being recapitulated as a result of the marketing campaign for a film version. After it made my list of titles that I would not acquire even for 25 cents because of the online glut, this title has risen again to Amazon’s top 20 in sales rankings, and the price market for a very good paperback copy is back up to the $7 to $8 range.

If you are going to buy and sell used fiction, your success will depend a lot on your ability to absorb this kind of information and develop a feel for the careers of well-known and lesser-known writers so that you can make educated guesses at first sight as to whether their books are common, uncommon, or scarce. I personally can’t imagine anyone succeeding in this field without being a serious reader and a lover and student of literature, but maybe that’s just my defensive bias because I need to make something, anything, out of that nicely bound degree in English Literature that’s collecting dust in the attic.

Three favorite areas of mine, when it comes to finding uncommon books that will fetch a good price, are modern poetry books, large-print hardcovers, and library discards:

· By modern poetry books, of course, I am not speaking of anthologies but of the smallish editions, often in paperback, of relatively little-known poets. Books of poetry tend to be printed in very small print runs of 5,000 or fewer copies, and by definition they are uncommon and relatively immune to market gluts. Yet they regularly turn up on the perpetual sale shelf at my local library, and usually bring $10 to $30 online. If I put such a volume on the shelf at a brick and mortar store and did not market it anywhere else, it might sit for five or ten years. But the wonderful thing about selling such a book online is that it only takes one buyer from the tens of millions to whom one has access.

· Large print hardcovers are printed in relatively small print runs, as well, and the people who are looking for them really want them. Virtually all of the large print books I have ever acquired have been library discards priced at a quarter each, and as one might expect they have been in unusually good condition for library discards. Perhaps because my competitors tend to shy away from library discards, there is seldom much price competition among these titles, and they usually bring somewhere over $10 each although I have a policy of never charging more than half the list price for these books. It is important to be especially fastidious in cataloguing and listing these books, or any books that turn up a “large print” description with their ISBN search, because the people who need them are in no position to hassle with you if they think they are ordering a good, clean large-print copy and receive something else in its place.

· Library discards don’t have much of a good reputation among booksellers, and are certainly without value in almost every case for collectors, but a well-preserved ex-library copy of an uncommon title can bring a decent price simply as a reading copy or library edition from a buyer who has been searching out that book for years. Note that this is an exception to the minimum condition standard of “Very Good” or better suggested elsewhere in this book. Ordinarily I will not rate a library discard above “Good,” but I believe library discards are worth acquiring if they are uncommon titles and are – aside from the usual stamps, labels, and lack of appeal for collectors – in “very good” condition.

Modern First Editions

One special class of uncommon books is Modern First Editions. Even among authors whose work is common or hyper-common, such as Grisham, Ludlum, Parker, Clancy, etc., there is a brisk market for Modern First Editions in fine or near fine condition, intact with fine dustjackets and no marks. They are far from scarce, and I would advise against paying more than a dollar for them, but there is a combination of three factors that provides you with a pretty good chance of selling them for somewhere between $25 and $30 each in Amazon’s Marketplace (at this writing):

· Best-selling authors have large numbers of serious fans who may have read some of the books in paperback on the beach or in an airplane, but who may want a nice first-edition collection of their favorite novelist’s work and be willing to pay a premium to build their libraries;

· Despite the fact that it may violate Amazon’s listing rules, many sellers list unsigned Modern First Editions as “collectible”, with the result that they cannot be priced below the list price for the title in question. Thus, if you are listing a fine first edition copy of John Grisham’s The Partner as a collectible, you cannot set a price below $26.96. At this writing there are 19 “collectible” copies listed at this $26.96 price, and 17 of the 19 are described as first editions. Why add another to the mix? Well, they do sell at these prices, steadily if not briskly. And, it is important to know, Amazon’s current practice is to display such listings, at each price point, on a “last listed, first displayed” basis, so if you list a copy with those 20 others today, yours will be the first a buyer sees, at least until the next one is listed by a seller, or, more happily, until your copy sells.

· There are also over 50 listed first edition copies of The Partner in “like new” or “very good” condition among the 324 hardcover copies classified not as “collectible” but as “used” by their sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace. These first edition copies currently range in price between $2.25 and $18.85. Our anecdotal evidence tells us that, despite market forces related to lower prices, these copies have no better chance of selling for a lower price as a “used” copy, because the potential buyer has to slog through hundreds of listings to find them, than they do when listed at a higher price under the “collectible” classification.

The sheer numbers of first editions available when an author gets the kind of first-run printings that Grisham does obviously suggests that I’ve misclassified some of these books in my own classification system by calling them “uncommon.” But I’ll keep them here for now just because, functionally, if listed as prominently and strategically as you can list them, I believe that you can price and sell these books as if they were uncommon.

Identifying First Editions

Listing and selling a book as a first edition may bring a significantly higher price for the book, but it requires that the book be an actual first edition/first print copy, usually in near fine or better condition. Naturally, the first place to look is the copyright page inside, to see if “First Edition” is stated on that page. Once a book passes that test, the next steps are steps of elimination:

· Make sure that it is not a book club edition (BCE) by applying the BCE tests enumerated later in this chapter; many BCEs incorrectly state that they are first editions.

· Look for any dates on the copyright page that are later than the first edition publication date, since such dates would obviously eliminate the possibility that the book in your hands is a first edition.

· Satisfy yourself that the book is not a “reprinted first edition” published by a reprint publisher. The following are well-known reprint publishers: A.L. Burt, Altermus, Avenel, Blakiston, Cassel, Collier, Greenwich House, Cupples & Leon, Fiction Library, Goldsmith, Grosset & Dunlap, Hurst, Saalfield, Sun Dial, Tower, and Triangle.

· Look for a row of numbers on the copyright page that looks like one of these rows:

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

or

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

or

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Publishers use these numerical strings to denote the printing (first, second, third, etc.) of a given edition that is represented. An intact string ordinarily means that a copy represents the first printing, and some publishers such as Random House let the words “First Edition” stand in place of the 1 and then use numerical strings whose lowest number is a 2. (Occasionally in place of a numerical string you will find an alphabetic string such as A B C D E, and the same rules apply). However, it is also necessary to be aware of the same problem of publisher sloppiness that sometimes plagues the administration of ISBNs: publishers often eave such details to the whim of employees at the low end of the pecking order and the followthrough can leave much to be desired. Consequently, the only thing that the numerical string can really prove to you is that, any time you see a lowest number of 3 or more in the numerical string, you can be sure that the book is not a first printing.

Once a book has passed these conventional tests, and is in fine or near fine condition, you may well have a collectible first edition, but if you stop here you always run the risk of having a buyer come back to you with the complaint that while the copy may be a “stated first edition,” it is not a “true first edition/first print” copy. If you are not willing to spend the additional time to research an apparent first edition’s “points” (a point, in this terminology, is a difference between one edition of a book and the next), I recommend that you do two things:

· List the book as a “stated first edition” rather than as a “first edition;” and

· Guarantee all items, which means that you will allow a no-hassle return and provide a full refund if a book is not what you thought it was.

But if you want to focus on modern first editions, it is well worth your time to keep working. To continue your investigation, we recommend that you explore the publisher-by-publisher information provided online in Glenn Larson’s Guide to First Edition Identification on the website of the International Book Collector’s Association at www.rarebooks.org/firsted.htm and consider acquiring and making use of some of the books suggested by my colleague Genevieve Kazdin in Appendix 3. Although some of its suggestions about specific books is dated, I strongly recommend Ian Ellis’ Book Finds: How to Find, Buy and Sell Used and Rare Books as a good beginning point for the bookseller who wants to venture into the fields of modern first editions and scarce, rare, and antiquarian books. As you proceed, you will no doubt increase your knowledge base so that you will not need to go back to the research texts every time, and what will initially be time-consuming will eventually, in many cases, become second nature.

Scarce and Rare Books

With the rapid development of the Internet as a transparent global marketplace for books, the definitions of what books are scarce or rare have changed. Scarce books usually have significant value because they have a limited supply that is outstripped by the demand for them, but there are almost always some copies available for sale online, and you should be able to get some sense of the price market for such books by surveying the price and condition of these copies at used.addall.com. Some items are scarce for the simple, structural reason that there were physical limitations placed on the number originally “produced,” such as limited edition printings and signed first editions. Truly rare books, on the other hand, are items that might come along once every few years, and you may not find a great deal of price guidance on the internet. Most general stock used booksellers will come across scarce and even rare books from time to time in the normal course of their acquisition process, and one’s chances of making such finds will be improved the more one looks for uncommon books in the first place, and the more one learns and gains a feel for what kinds of books might be likely to be less common. But you’ll also make great finds in commonplace haunts like library sales and thrift shops.

It would be futile to attempt to do justice to such a subject in a single chapter here, when there are shelves and shelves of very good books on the subject. The best I can do is to offer some guidance about where to pursue the kind of informal education that is a prerequisite for a seller who wishes to venture into the areas of scarce, rare, and antiquarian books, and perhaps to provide come encouragement as to why such a venture might be a worthwhile pursuit. There is a tremendous wealth of information available online, and I recommend beginning with the websites of the International Book Collectors Association (www.rarebooks.org) and the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (www.abaa.org). When it comes to books on book collecting, I suggest you consult the excellent casual bibliography that my esteemed colleague Genevieve Kazdin (www.amazon.com/shops/dunesstudio) has provided for this project in Appendix 3. If you can find a bookseller with experience in these fields who is willing to let you serve a brief apprenticeship, you will be very lucky and should make every effort to take advantage.

The point made a few paragraphs ago about Amazon’s “last in, first displayed” policy is an enormously important one, and it underlines the importance of regularly refreshing one’s listings, an important marketing tactic that is addressed elsewhere in this book. We can probably file this one under “Do what I say and not what I do,” but it is clear to me that, on average, smart booksellers go through 25 or more of their oldest listings each day in a systematic way to review whether they are still priced competitively and displayed prominently. This does not always mean lowering prices to stay competitive; I have often relisted titles with higher prices based on such a review. And I have also often found titles that were listed and priced as I wanted them, but which I took down and posted again in order to improve their placement in a list of several competitors’ copies at the same price point.

It is possible that there are ethical issues that a seller should sort out in dealing with issues such as Amazon’s instruction that “You may select ‘Collectible’" if your item is signed, out-of-print, or otherwise rare.” I have heard sellers justify their “collectible” classification, for example” of an unsigned copy of The Partner by saying that, by definition, a first-printing first edition is out of print as soon as the second printing gets underway. Although there is something about this rationale that makes me think a certain former saxophone-playing U.S. President’s riff on the definition of “is” while being questioned about his Oval Office dalliances, I am nonetheless impressed with the creative thinking employed by these sellers, and I do not disagree with them. If Amazon believes that listing an unsigned first edition as “collectible” is a violation of its listing policies, I have certainly not seen any sign of that in terms of delisting or other sanctions. It is worth noting that the “collectible” classification practice increases Amazon’s per-transaction profit, and it also is plausible that it improves the “customer experience” for those buyers who want to be able to find fine first editions easily, even though it means that they may pay a higher price for them than if they rooted around a while among the “used” listings.

Research: Tuning In to the Market

It is dangerous to attempt any advice about what books to acquire, because contemporary or “general stock” used book markets can change so quickly that they will make a fool of the advice-giver, so the best I can do here is to suggest first that if you are trying to make a living selling used general stock you should do regular and systematic research into demand, price market, and availability. The Internet makes it possible to do this very easily, using many of the same websites that we discuss elsewhere in this book as places to sell, and to a somewhat lesser extent as places to buy. In addition to the actual e-commerce sites where one could complete transactions directly, it also makes sense to pay attention to title-searching sites such as Used.addall.com and Bookfinder (www.bookfinder.com). Comb through these sites searching for titles, browsing subject areas, identifying the pricing and used-copy availability trends of current and recent best-sellers as well as strong backlist titles. Look for trends that will help you determine what items you might best take to Half.com as opposed to Amazon, and what would do better in an auction setting on eBay. None of us has time to be totally thorough about this kind of research, but an hour or two a week will pay off significantly in your ongoing efforts to find the best markets for your listings. Here are some suggestions about places to conduct your research:

· www.amazon.com, with attention to subject best seller lists, Marketplace searches sorted by price, author searches, and special lists such as previous year bestsellers and award-winners

· www.half.com, using the relatively new category-searching functions to browse category best-sellers and note pricing trends

· www.ebay.com, by clicking on “Browse” and exploring successful auctions

· Used.addall.com’s tag line invites you to “search, compare, and save at 40 bookstores, 20,000 dealers, and millions of books.” It won’t search Amazon or eBay for you, but it will give you a fairly speedy search of every used copy of any title you enter that is available from, at this writing, Advanced Book Exchange, Alibris, Antiqbook, Bibliology, Biblion, Bibliopoly, Biblioroom, Elephantbooks, Half.com, ILAB, JustBooks.co.uk, and Powell's Books, with full listing information. Now if that doesn’t give you some sense of the market for a book, then one of two things is true. Either we’re talking about a very scarce book for which you are likely to make a lot of money, or a very dense bookseller who is not likely to make much money at all.

One way of tuning into your market is to develop areas of specialization, since one individual cannot possibly become expert in all areas of the used book market simultaneously. Start with what you know and love and hone that knowledge until it becomes real and marketable expertise, whether the field is literary fiction, poetry, mysteries, travel books, cookbooks, computer books, business books, military history, baseball, religion, large-print books, illustrated books – well, you catch my drift – it really can be any area you desire to expand your familiarity with.

Identifying Book Club Editions

Book Club Editions (BCEs) have little or no value for book collectors and should in most cases be avoided. The mere fact that a book club edition has been printed suggests that a title is common and, therefore, unlikely to fetch a very good price, either, from the market of non-collecting readers. The trick, then, is to educate oneself to recognize and avoid the telltale signs that a particular copy may indeed be a book club edition. Here are some common signs:

· Many BCEs include the printed words “Book Club Edition” at the bottom of the inside flap of the front cover.

· A hardcover, dustjacketed book without a price at the top of the inside flap of the front cover is usually, but not always, a BCE. (The most common exceptions to this “rule” come from university, academic, and small independent presses, which sometimes avoid printing the price so permanently on their books, largely because a small print run may last for several years and necessarily undergo pricing changes due to market changes).

· A book which has experienced the clipping or cutting of either the bottom of the inside flap of the front cover, or both the bottom and the top of the inside flap of the front cover, is very likely to be a BCE.

· If you have other reasons to suspect a book is a BCE, such as inferior paper quality or smaller size, don’t be thrown off the scent by a clipped “price corner.” It may well be that what was clipped was not the price, but the absence of a price, in an effort to disguise a BCE.

· However, printed words such as “A Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club” or “A Main Selection of the Literary Guild” do not mean that a copy is a BCE; indeed, they probably mean the opposite. Publishers print these phrases on trade editions of their books for their marketing power, in order to signal to prospective bookstore buyers the popularity of the titles in question.

· Any other reference to BOMC, the Book-of-the-Month Club, or any other book club on the copyright page or anywhere else on a book strongly indicates that a copy is a BCE copy.

· BCEs often state on the copyright page that they are First Editions. Of course, they are not.

· BCEs often have a depression such as a circle, dot, square, maple leaf, or similar mark, sometimes in red, on the bottom of the back cover.

· Recent BCEs often have a rectangular block on the lower right back dustcover with an adjacent four- or five-digit number.

Although the vast majority of BCEs are reprints of trade hardcovers, there are several books that are the first hardcover editions of paperback originals and a very few that are indeed true first editions. In some but not all cases these BCEs may have value not usually associated with BCEs.

Don’t Buy These Books! Things to Avoid There will be exceptions to nearly all of these prohibitions, but you’d better know why you are making exceptions before you make them! · Book club editions · Reader’s Digest editions · Outdated editions of textbooks · Outdated editions of computer books · Encyclopedias · Popular romance mass market paperbacks · Mass market editions of the highest selling books in the past two or three years · Books with a musty odor, regardless of how clean they may look – mold and mildew spread! · Outdated editions of extremely popular self-help books · Books with broken hinges, missing pages, shaken spines or torn covers · Books whose covers have been torn off – they are stolen goods · Advance reading copies, unless “collectible” · Hardcover books without dustjackets, with occasional exceptions · Books that are so large or heavy that shipping them will cost you more than you are likely to make on the sale

And, generally speaking, any book that is extremely common for any reason so that its sellers have already glutted the market with copies for sale on the cheap