Best place to sell books in 2025?

Lulu58

I have a load of books I would like to sell to earn a little bit of cash and wondered where the best place is to sell them?

They are mainly books about philosphy, politics, economics etc and were very expensive to buy.

I can't see anything recent on this topic on the forums but apologies if I've missed something.

lincroft1710

There have been several threads on this board about selling books.


Amazon, eBay, car boot sale, second hand bookshop as places to sell all spring to mind and all have advantages and disadvantages


Being expensive to buy new does not automatically translate into getting a good price for them secondhand

CliveOfIndia

As above, the likes of eBay etc. will probably be your best bet.  It's more of a hassle than selling them to one of the many online places that buy books, DVDs etc., but you should get a better price for them (no guarantee, of course!).

If any of them are official - and current - text books, it may be worth seeing if your local school/college/university as applicable would let you pin an advert on their notice-board.  Any student studying an appropriate course would probably be glad to buy them for a substantial discount compared to new.  Obviously, that's only feasible if the books are still part of the approved reading list for the course in question.

Emmia

Have you looked at World of Books? They will offer you a valuation for your books

https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb

subjecttocontract

Selling books on EBay worked for me a couple of years back. Biggest problem is having to wrap & post them. I got to know what titles were sought after/ what sold well, what didnt. But you have to shift quite a few to make decent money.

Green_hopeful

I have sold quite a few vintage books on eBay. I check Abe books to see roughly what they are being sold for and then check the ebay sold prices. Something to watch out for is the postage costs. Some books can be very expensive to post because they are large and or heavy. 

vacheron

I find selling books individually too much time / cost and effort (unless research shows they have significant value),

Also as private seller shipping with no bulk shipping arrangements it will cost you at least £2 each to ship a reasonably thick book.

For this reason I so I tend to bundle up 5 or 6 books of a similar genre so the price / size of the shipping box is just under the 2kg / small parcel size for a tracked 48 shipping and ship them all together for £3.45. 

If I had hundreds though they would either be off to charity or a second hand bookseller. 

soolin

The book market has been quite poor for several years, so much access via Internet etc means less books for study are actually bein bought. There is also the issue of print books often not being up to date enough for study.

As above check out values on places like Abe books, or even ebay completed/sold lists (on ebay never look at listed prices, only solds) . You can look on Amazon as well but ideally you need the ranking of the book to be quite high as that indicates if they sell or not, when I sold books professionally I rarely bothered with any books where there was already one listed but where the ranking was more than 100,000 or even 50.000

Nebbit

I mail out a lot of books (for review rather than to purchasers) and the cheapest cost for sending a book, second hand standard postage, is now £3.90. This applies to all but the thinnest paperbacks which can go as a large letter. 

Lulu58

Thanks for the replies everyone.  You've given me plenty of the food for thought!