I put a load of old books on Amazon ages ago and intially I did reasonably well. It’d actually been about 18months since I took an active interest in what I had listed and I got an order out of the blue.

So having gone and posted the book I took a closer look at my account – Amazon charged me £1.60 to sell a book priced at £1.50 then allowed me the princelly sum of £2.80 for postage. Postage actually cost £3.00 so I’m down 30p before I even factor in envelopes and getting to the post office.

I’m aware this is a post office issue as much as an Amazon one, but I can’t see how an individual can sell anything when competing with warehouses selling £0.01 books via discounted postal contracts 🙁

Charity shop?

Waste of time – I check the value with Amazon and if it’s less than £20 then I just take it to the charity shop / local second hand book shop.

Trouble is, loads of people are doing what we’re doing, swapping real books for their Kindle copies.

I to sold some big textbooks through Amazon / eBay — lost out on several due to huge postage costs – for textbooks I took em to local college, others its charity shop.

come on you know the value of a book isnt in its physicality its in the words! priceless.

charity shop.

I shifted some via Zapper (IIRC) a while back, not a lot of money but better than nothing. Did take a while to do though (but that was OK, it was useful thinking time about what books to keep) But most of them went to the charity sale we hold here.

I did quite well on Amazon’s buy-back thing, trade-in account – but you only get Amazon play money for that stuff. Which is fine given my book habit, not ideal for ridding oneself of material possessions.

Once selling methods are open to a wide audience it usually results in a race to the bottom, price wise.

Simple economics.

Unless you restrict one element this will be the natural outcome.

But on the otherhand, I like buying cheap books from Amazon.

Along with charity shops, maybe youth hostel or similar.

I did the zapper thing when I moved to oz. Get yourself a (free) phone app that reads the barcodes, which cuts down the time invested. I recon they wanted about 1 in 5 of mine, but it was £100 gratefully received.

Trouble is, loads of people are doing what we’re doing, swapping real books for their Kindle copies

I love my kindle but if I read a book on that I like I’ll always keep an eye out for a paper copy in charity shops. I’m quite happy now not to own physical copies of movies or music but somehow books are different – I just like having them around.

I give some of them away Like This.

Just write a note inside ” I hope you enjoy this story,please pass it on when you are finished with it”

Used to do Read It Swap It but the Post Office charges have killed it for me, now just take it to charity shop