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where to sell old (text) books

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electricpete

Electrical
May 4, 2001
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Early in my career (before the internet), I hoarded textbooks. First my college texts, then an assortment of new and used books as I got into new areas in my work. Now I'm late in my career and don't need them as much, and have most of the info available electronically anyway. The dates in the front of the books ranges from around 1980 to 2005. I have a least 100 of them collecting dust and taking space in my garage.

I took a first pass through the books (trip down memory lane) to see which I could part with and so I packed up about 50 of those books and lugged them to a local Half Priced Books store. I was expecting HPB would offer me some $ for my books, because I had picked one of the books at random that had 1980 copyright date and found it for sale on the Half Priced Books website at about 25% of the original manufacturer's price (if they're selling it then I assumed they'd be interested in buying it). So I lugged 3 crates of textbooks into the store and put them on the counter and the clerk told me to browse around while they reviewed my books. After about 30 minutes they texted me that they had completed their review. I went to the clerk who told me quite unceremoniously that they were not at all interested in any of my precious textbooks (not even a nickel was offered). He explained the way the HPB chain works is that this particular branch only buys what they can sell in-store (even though the parent company sells on-line... he didn't know where they got the books to sell online). And Engineering text books are niche books not interesting to the vast majority of the general audience that might wander into his store.

On the other hand they certainly might (?) be interesting among a wider audience of on-line buyers searching out reference books in specific engineering areas if I could figure out an easy way to do that. I guess I could sell them and ship them one by one on ebay ... but that sounds like a lot of work (which is a 4 letter word to me!). I was hoping to just walk in and drop off my crates of books and collect the cash. Maybe there is somewhere to donate them for a reasonable tax deduction? Beats me.

I'll bet others here are (or have been) in a similar situation. Any suggestions?



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Thanks.

Abebooks might be better in terms of locating buyers but it looks similar to ebay in terms of selling effort (have to list the books individually and ship them off individually). I'll think about that but still looking for an easier way...

Burn for heat, haha, yeah that's pretty easy.

I guess that's probably all the suggestions I'm gonna get. Now out of curiosity, what did you guys do with your college textbooks? Sold them back to the bookstore while at college, stashed them away in dusty storage somewhere, or proudly displaying them on your study bookshelf still today?


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electricpete said:
...or proudly displaying them on your study bookshelf still today?

That's where a bunch of mine are:

QS-016_knluzs.jpg

September 2022 (Apple iPhone 11 Pro)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
Mine seem to be slowly disappearing. My wife did say I need to get rid of a lot of my junk, as she doesn't want to have to do it when I kick the bucket. So she is probably making a staged preemptive strike.
 
Local library or technical college - let them dump them if not needed, unbeknown to you so your conscious is clear [thumbsup2]

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. (Sherlock Holmes - A Scandal in Bohemia.)
 
Yes, donating sounds like a good answer. We have a local community college with a very strong technical focus (they're well funded by local industrial plants), they might be interested in a few of these. If the rest get tossed in the trash, that's not on me. Assuming I can talk them into writing out a receipt for something like "three crates of used textbooks" then I think I can claim a deduction of... let's say $500.



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(2B)+(2B)' ?
 
Years ago, my university was soliciting photos taken on campus and in the local area, for the school's archive. If you donated the original slides and negatives you could take a tax deduction (copies didn't cut it). That's when I decided to start digitizing all of my slides and negatives. This was in 2000 and so I bought a Canoscan FS-4000US film scanner. It cost me around $995 (in 2000 dollars) and I've scanned nearly 21,000 negatives and slides in the past 20+ years. And it still works. So I guess I got my money's worth.

Canon stopped supporting it years ago and their software has long been obsoleted (no longer supported on Mac OS), however, I found a company named Hamrick Software which makes a product called 'VueScan' which works with virtually any scanner, including not only my old Canoscan film scanner but my latest Epson all-in-one printer which allows me to create, using the VueScan software, PDF documents, including multi-page documents using the document feeder/scanner on the printer.

In the end, I donated something like 800 items (slides, negative, large format transparencies, and prints where I had no negatives). I took a charitable deduction of $1,200 (that's $1.50/image, which is what the university was paying when I worked for the school newspaper and yearbook). The IRS never blinked an eye. Note that a significant number of my images are now part of the public repository of photos at my university's archive:


John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
Speaking of digitization, I now own way more digital books than I ever owned in physical books, by a factor of 10x or more ;-)

There's also a lot more access to digital literature, which is way better than the stacks of magazines and articles that were unsortable and uncatalogged, given the limits of a small corner of my house.

Luckily, external hard drives are a bit like the TARDIS, keeping roughly the same external dimensions but growing in capacity on the inside; I'vr gone from my first external HD that was about 1 GB, costing nearly $500, to my current one at 4 TB, which was only about $120. So, that's going from $500/GB to only $33/GB -- fight inflation, buy external HDs!

And thy're searchable, both by title and the contents within.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
Yes, my MacBook Pro has a 500Gb Solid State drive and I've got a 3Tb USB3 portable hard-drive that I take with me when I travel, as well as a 4Tb Firewire hard-drive that's my archive, which goes in the safe when we're on the road. I've still got an old 2Tb hard-drive in the safe that's sort of a back-up archive, but those files are getting a bit out of date, so I might wipe it and trash it, or put my really critical stuff on it as just another emergency backup.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
 
A very interesting conversation for a number of reasons -

Wife and I just moved to a new house and my boxes of books was the lion share of boxed items.

I'm also going to re-evaluate the reference books I have and what I use on a regular basis.

Lastly I have a close relative who works at a local HPB store.

Like EP, and until I read this thread, I was hoping to find a reasonable way to get rid of the books and still make a few pennies. Most but not all of my older books were from Ebay, so I figure there is still a market out there but admittedly it make take a while to match up the right person then do the packaging and shipping.

From my resource at HPB, I knew better than to go there. I'm sure they're reasonable for some books but definitely not science or technical.

Maybe we can start a Eng-Tips Book Store?!?!?

BTW, many of you mention digital texts. Where do you get your technical digital texts?

Thanks.

Regards,
Qshake
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Where do you get your technical digital texts?

There are things that pop up every so often. Lilienthal has a heat transfer book permanently for free. Others are one-time offers, or such as one author that routinely puts their book price at $0.00 once every couple of months. There are also a plethora of older books that no longer have copyright protection and can be downloaded. There are also sites that allow you to read whatever's in theit collection for a small fee per month.

Maybe we can start a Eng-Tips Book Store?!?!?

While physical books appear to be still a thing in Europe (I've not seen so many small bookshops in decades); they're mostly dead in the US (one college tips site recommends not buying any physical books). I think Borders and Barnes & Noble are the only major bookd retailers still extant. The biggest issue, I think, is that those that can afford to arbitrarily buy books are also the same people that are older, and looking to dowsize at some point in time (me!) and there's just no longer any room for them. I used to have 8 bookshelves with books stacked double per shelf (front and back stacks), but now, I'm down to about half of one bookshelf.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
Good stuff as always IRStuff!

Also I'm guessing that expert link at the bottom is the request for 7 red lines....with blue ink?

Regards,
Qshake
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Eng-Tips Forums:Real Solutions for Real Problems Really Quick.
 
Yes sir, that's the video alright. I still laugh at that no matter how many times I see it.

Regards,
Qshake
[pipe]
Eng-Tips Forums:Real Solutions for Real Problems Really Quick.
 
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