4 ms·
When I was in college I sold discarded text books on half.com. This isn’t my best income stream, but in many ways it was my favorite. After the Spring 2000 sem
by powvans 4y ago
When I was in college I sold discarded text books on half.com. This isn’t my best income stream, but in many ways it was my favorite.
After the Spring 2000 semester, I noticed that the bookstores had junk book bins. Students would dump into the bins any books that the bookstore would not buy back. Anyone was welcome to rummage through the bin and if they found something interesting they could keep it.
The bookstores wouldn’t buy books back if they knew that a new version had been released. They of course wanted to avoid being stuck with useless inventory. I wondered if these books had residual value elsewhere. I collected a few and took them home and started looking up them up on half.com. Sure enough, all of them had listings and lots of them were listed for 10’s of dollars!
For the next few days I made a continuous circuit around all the bookstores, loading my car with any books I found in the bins, and dumping them in my living room. At night I would list the day’s haul. Because my inventory was free, I always listed $1 lower than the cheapest listing.
I now had an inventory of several thousand books and a very irritated set of roommates, including my future wife. All I had to do was sit back and wait for classes to start somewhere in the world where one of these books might still be in use.
Within a week orders started to roll in. Soon I was heading to the post office daily with a huge load of books. Things would quiet down whenever a there was a lull in sessions starting. I’d replenish inventory as the various summer sessions completed.
Fall semester generated a huge bump sales and I was able to get a huge inventory of books when the semester ended. Unfortunately that proved to be the last semester of junk book bins. The stores got wise to what the kid in the beat up Honda was up to and started collecting the junk books for themselves.
I continued to sell what books I had and that went on for the rest of the time I was in school. After graduation my wife demanded that I chuck the rest. She’d had enough of random stacks of old textbooks.
- ozfive 4y agoWow, what a scrappy story! Thank you for sharing and happy that you got rid of the remaining books to marry your wife!
- oefnak 4y agoYes, take the free books meant for poor students and sell them! (It's smart, but I think it is morally wrong.)
- pooper 4y agoSomebody stole my calculus textbook and sold it to the bookstore. This textbook cost over USD 200 new iirc. I would have probably paid the thief more than what the bookstore paid them for my used book.
- MawKKe 4y agoto me it sounds like they were serving the interest of poor students by distributing cheap books to where there was demand. Otherwise those books could have been left in the bin gathering dust
- powvans 4y agoThey would have just thrown them in the dumpster. The point of the bin was to stop people from filling the trash cans with their used books.
- jxramos 4y agothat's interesting, so different locales around the world would operate on different editions. So in the locale you picked up where the old editions were useless they found a home elsewhere in the world. Cool stuff.
- waltbosz 4y agoI used to sell on half.com . My dad was a college professor and would get free sample textbooks from the publishers that wanted him to consider them for his classes. He'd give them to me to sell But my most memorable sale was to see the name of a classmate on my half.com portal. I just handed him the book in class one day instead of having to take it to the post office. I'd also buy deeply discounted old editions from the school bookstore to resell. They still had resale value because not all schools would update to the latest book right away.