A book hunter is a person who invests in books and sells them for profit. The books can be found from any source and may cover any topic. The trick to profiting in the used book trade is to learn how to shop around for the highest appraised value.
The beauty of being a book hunter is that the work of buying and selling books can be done entirely online. The book hunter uses sites like Amazon.com, eBay.com and Half.com to find deals on books that are priced below what online book buyers are willing to pay for the books.
Online book buyers are companies that allow book owners to sell their books to online book stores rather than to individual private buyers. Much like taking a television to a pawn shop, the book buying company offers the book owner an appraised value based on the demand for the book and the condition of the book in question. Books in high demand and in the best condition offer the highest pay outs.
Companies that appraise and offer payments for books are AbeBooks.com and Cash4Books.net. These sites allow book owners to determine how much their books are worth and to sell their books for immediate cash. The book hunter must realize that not every book will be in demand and the different sites that offer payment for books often appraise books at different values. The best way to guarantee a profit is to search the web for cheap books, copy and paste the ISBN (a number unique to each book that identifies it within computer systems) from the “for sale” page to the appraisal page to determine whether or not the value of the book is more than the “for sale” and “shipping” costs of the book. In essence, the book hunter is appraising the value of a book that they have not actually bought yet.
One thing that many new book hunters forget to do is to keep track of the shipping costs. Many clever sellers on eBay, for instance, impose inflated shipping rates to be able to offer their books for a lower cost. The only way that the book hunter will make a profit is to make sure that the asking price and shipping cost are lower than the appraised value of the book.
Eventually the book hunter will come across a book that is worth more than the advertised selling price and shipping cost combined. All the book hunter has to do is order the book, wait for it to be delivered, and mail it off to the book buying company that offered the highest appraisal for the book.
The book hunter doesn’t have to worry about the appraisal quotes expiring before the hunter is able to get the book from the original seller because most appraisal websites will usually guarantee the quoted value of a book for anywhere between two weeks to a month.
In situations where multiple copies of the same cheap book are available, the book hunter is advised to buy as many copies as the book buying and appraisal company will allow for trade. Many appraisal companies may limit the number of copies a book hunter can sell at the same time for the same price. The cut off is usually between 1 and 20 copies.
This process can be repeated over and over as many times as the book hunter would like. To give you some tips on how to become a successful book hunter, you can check some reviews online. On top of that, you will also get to know some ways on how to make money using the Internet.
In most cases, the book buying company, same as the one that appraised your books and offered you money for your books, will even cover the cost of shipping from you to them.
Being a book hunter can be pretty exciting, following the trails of the most valuable books and selling those books back to the book stores that will reintroduce the book into circulation.
