This is a great time of year to sell your old college textbooks compared to the end of a semester. At the end of a semester you have two things going against you. First, that’s when everyone else is selling their books. More competition means lower prices. Second, since books for the next semester haven’t been announced, buyers don’t know which books they’ll need. So you might be able to sell a book that will be worthless in a few months since they are buying some of everything, but you’re unlikely to get as good a price for the books that will be needed.

Fast forward to this time of year, right before the start of a fall semester. Now, few people are selling books and those books that are needed are in high demand. Both of those factors means higher selling prices. Plus, you didn’t sell your books sooner, so they’re still taking up space and depreciating as time goes by.

There are many places to sell textbooks online, which is why I like Bigwords.com so much. There you can do comparison shopping for buying and selling of books. Think of it like a reverse Google Product Search or Shopzilla. You just punch in the ISBN numbers for the books you are selling and they tell you which of the online book buyers is offering the best price.

I used Bigwords on all of the old textbooks I was thinking about selling. Out of about 50 books (yes, I had a lot) about 10 books were worth decent money. Using Bigwords price data, I ended up selling to three different sites: textbooks.com, bookbyte.com, and valorebooks.com.

All three sites basically worked the same way: I entered the books that they were offering the best price for, printed the prepaid shipping label, packed the books and a packing slip and sent them off. Textbooks.com used UPS and the other two used the US Postal Service. I received email notifications when they got my books and then received a check in the mail in about a week. By donating the worthless books, I gained a ton of closet and shelf space as well. For the 20 minutes of work, I received almost $300 for the books that I sold!