Most of us have a huge stack of books around the house – whether they’re hanging out on shelves, the guest room, in closets, the garage, or anywhere else.
Often these non-fiction and fiction books are read once never to be looked at again or are unwanted gifts. They are then usually bagged and left at thrift stores.
However, with the cost of paper and energy soaring in recent years, Waterstones boss James Daunt has warned that the £9.99 benchmark for a fresh off the shelf paperback will rise.
He says publishers will likely have to add £2 to each book price, which equates to a new price of £11.99.
Book Bonanza: Most of us have dozens — if not hundreds — of books gathering dust
According to Nielsen BookData, the average retail price of a paperback is already over £10 and the average adult fiction paperback has increased from £9.54 in 2019 to £10.38 in 2022.
Meanwhile, the typical hardback has increased from £18.22 to £20.25 in three years.
But if you turn this on its head, households could potentially make more money selling an unwanted horde of books online.
For example, Ziffit – a scanning app that allows you to sell books, DVDs and CDs – said it pays an average of 10 percent more per book than in January.
This is how you can benefit:
Download at least three apps
Apps like Music Magpie, WeBuyBooks, and Ziffit usually let you turn your smartphone into a barcode scanner.
They then spit out an instant prize. You pack them, print a label and send them in the mail for free.
To make the most money from your books, it’s vital to download at least three of these book scanning apps
That’s because each offers different prices – and this can add up the more books you scan. It is quite possible to scan 10 books in a minute.
| Music magpie | WeBuyBooks | Ziffit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman | £0.31 | Do not buy at this time | £0.51 |
| Normal People – Sally Rooney | £0.10 | Do not buy at this time | £0.10 |
| Daisy Jones and the Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid | £0.27 | £0.48 | £0.54 |
| It ends with us – Colleen Hoover | £0.27 | £0.27 | €0.50 |
| Where the Crawfish Sing – Delia Owens | £0.40 | Do not buy at this time | €0.50 |
| The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald | £0.12 | Do not buy at this time | £0.10 |
| Little Women – Louisa May Alcott | £0.56 | £0.49 | £0.70 |
| Alice in Wonderland (illustrated) – Lewis Carroll | £0.24 | £0.36 | £0.40 |
| Exciting times – Naoise Dolan | £0.12 | £0.15 | £0.40 |
| A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara | €0.95 | £1.99 | £1.30 |
| Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen | £1.60 | £2.56 | £1.80 |
| A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire) – George RR Martin | £0.13 | Do not buy at this time | €0.50 |
| The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse – Charlie Mackisey | £0.73 | £1.10 | £1.50 |
| Total | £5.80 | £7.40 | £8.85 |
| Music magpie | WeBuyBooks | Ziffit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prisoners of Geography – Tim Marshall | £0.45 | Do not buy at this time | £0.80 |
| This is going to hurt – Adam Kay | Do not buy at this time | £0.20 | £0.40 |
| Food for Life – Tim Spector | £2.08 | £4.84 | £3.60 |
| The official highway code | £0.34 | £1.00 | £0.60 |
| Reserve – Prince Harry | £1.28 | £1.21 | £2.70 |
| Sapiens Yuval Harari | £0.48 | Do not buy at this time | £0.80 |
| A History of Wales – Richard King | £2.13 | £1.80 | £1.60 |
| Taste: my life through food – Stanley Tucci | £0.28 | £0.25 | €0.50 |
| All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein | £0.71 | £0.55 | £0.80 |
| Freakonomics – Steven Levitt | £0.59 | £1.00 | £1.00 |
| On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin | £0.98 | £1.51 | £1.70 |
| One Pan Wonders – Jamie Oliver | £1.04 | £1.61 | £2.10 |
| Total | £11.44 | £13.97 | £16.60 |
Taking the 25 books above, if you pick the highest price paid by each app, you could earn a good few extra dollars.
Our research shows that if you scale this up to 250 books, that can be a difference of more than £80 if you only stick to one app.
James Francis, who runs the beloved phone marketplace Mozillion, said, “I’ve sold a bunch of books and CDs on Ziffit and Music Magpie.
“I used both because the values of each item can vary a lot, so I had both apps running, so I could scan any item with both. Sometimes you got a CD worth 20 pence at Music Magpie, but £2 at Ziffit.’
What brings in the highest prices?
Books that the experts say are most valuable are textbooks.
Music Magpie and WeBuyBooks both say textbooks are among the highest value books it sells, likely due to high demand among students on a budget.
WeBuyBooks says ammunition research maps, as well as books on more niche topics like beekeeping, military history, and architecture books, fetch higher prices.
Ziffit’s main genres are medicine, computer science and IT, technology, engineering and agriculture, and math and science.
This further confirms that manuals and textbooks tend to fetch higher prices because they are expensive to begin with.
Meanwhile, interest in movies and TV may also drive up prices.
A spokesperson for WeBuyBooks said, “An example might be an increase in the value of the Twilight saga books when the movies are released because the reading materials are much more popular and may be harder to come by.
“Price checks are conducted company-wide once a week to maintain highly competitive prices.”
It’s also possible that obscure and out-of-print titles can also sell for higher prices – again, use the scanning apps, but also check how much they’re listed for on marketplaces like Ebay, to get a meter.
Finally, collected volumes are usually sold at higher prices, such as the Game of Thrones series currently fetching £8 on Music Magpie.
How much can you earn with old books?
You’re unlikely to make a fortune selling your old books, but these apps make it incredibly quick to get rid of them and tidy up the house.
The price of books depends on demand and these apps don’t always offer money for it.
In that case, it might be best to sell them in bulk at a boot sale, or see how much they fetch on Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, or even Vinted, a marketplace that’s become especially popular for selling second-hand clothes.
Users set their own price, so you may be able to sell your books for more than through other apps, but there’s no guarantee they’ll sell.
Don’t forget that you also have to pay seller fees on Ebay.
If you have first or limited editions of certain books, these selling apps should be bypassed – and they should be sold through Ebay or a specialized website.
Ziffit says prices change regularly depending on market demand and how many items it currently has in stock.
It currently pays an average of 83 pence for a hardback and 57 pence for a paperback.
Ziffit says its low average price is reduced by lower-quality books it buys.
WeBuyBooks says its customers have made an average of £27.22 this year. If you sell more than £25 worth of items, WeBuyBooks increases the amount it pays by 5 percent.
Paper pain: The printing industry is grappling with supply chain issues and rising raw material costs
Why are prices rising?
Printing costs have risen significantly as the printing industry grapples with supply chain issues and rising raw material costs.
The rising cost of new books is likely to trickle down to the used book market, which has been on a steady rise for some time.
A spokesperson for Music Magpie, which buys and sells used goods, said: ‘If the average cost of books rises, it is likely that if the new books released at the increased price pass through the chain and are resold, it will increase the price. would increase. we pay for them.
‘The cost of new books and the trade-in value are inextricably linked.’
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