Thursday 16 June 2011

Someone else's 2nd Hand Book take

   I never knew that Charity shops chuck out religious texts or Sexy books as a matter of procedure. Could be worth making a deal with your local shops to collect such items and save them going in the bin.

  Here is a recent article on 2nd hand books from the net:



One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

You must have heard this adage, and in my experience it is so often true...
We often get offered the opportunity to rummage through recycling bags in charity shops. Many charity shops have arrangements with a recycling company to remove any unwanted books.
To be fair most of the books left for recycling are complete tat. However, there are often a few hidden treasures... I have lost count of how many books we have removed from 'rubbish bags' that later went on to render us a nice profit.
One shop we have an arrangement with in our local town, usually has a dozen boxes full of what they class as 'dud' books. We often find some lovely books, perhaps with inscriptions or with slight page edge tanning, which means the shop will not put them out on the shelves and just discards them.
Some charity shops have a policy of discarding books on certain subjects, for example; books on religion or books with a sexual/erotic content. These types of titles are often binned regardless of condition.
But it's not only shop policy that comes into play; some shop managers have personal preferences that deter them for putting certain genres of books out for sale.
Unwanted topics can also include motivational, self help books, study books, foreign language fiction/non fiction. Holiday guide books, children's books, royalty and hardbacks older than 6 months old - this seems ridiculous but that's fine with us... these are types of books that tend to sell very well thank you very much!
We often pick up older Sci Fi paperbacks - ok they may have a cover creasing or page tanning, but as long as the pages are tight we will list them. I once picked up a few copies of the books accompanying the Stargate TV series currently being shown on Sky TV: two sold for over £25 each, one for nearly £40!
We only pay 25p or less for books that we have to rummage for, many shops are happy for us to do this as they 'get a double bite of the cherry': money from us for the books we have rescued, and money from the recycler when he collects the books from them. Plus 25p is usually much more than the recycler will pay them. Generally they only pay a few pennies per book or so much per hundredweight of books.
We have been known to rescue 50 books or more from recycling bags. Many of these are 'punts' in that the subject matter is quite niche/obscure, we just do not know if they will have any value or demand on the Amazon site. If when I get them home I find them to be truly valueless I recycle them myself. After all, you only need one or two to come up trumps to make it well worth your while!

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