Money collecting dust

My kids love to read! We get books from the library nearly every week, but still we have a lot of books. It it not a bad problem to have. But they are everywhere. So we decided that it was finally time to give up the decades old college book collection collecting dust and make some room for kids books.

We of course wanted to do this right. Good books can be donated and those not so good can be recycled at specialty recyclers (due to binding glue, etc.). But what do we do with those huge text books we paid $50 used for, could some poor college student really still be having to read these books?

Sure enough there are tons of college text book buy back websites out there that will pay you for your books, and even pay for the shipping. Here are some things we learned in the 2-33 hours we spent searching sites and punching in ISBN numbers from the back of the book:

- Don't wait 15 plus years to try to sell your books :) Most of our books didn't fetch much money, were too old and will likely just be recycled.

- Remove all the tape over the bar codes so you can just sit down and punch in all the numbers fast ( this would have been a great project for my kids).

- There are a lot of site options with various prices for buy back, in the end I went with Amazon because the gave me Amazon credit (slightly more than cash) and I felt they are reputable.

- I was very surprised to find it so text book specific on what the would buy back. We had double copies of great classics like Plato's Republic. Maybe it was the version we had, but I was shocked to find they wouldn't buy it back. Huh? Maybe there is a different buy back program for those types of books?

In just a short time we had about a half dozen books sorted out and about $12.50 in store credit plus a ups shipping slip. Not a goldmine or anything, but along with donations and recycling it felt good to think the books might find use somehow at least for a little while longer.