Thursday, June 7, 2007

The Project that Ate my Week

I honestly didn't think this little project would take this long, but it's Thursday and I'm still plugging away. Sheesh.

I've been listing books on Half.com and Amazon's Marketplace for a couple of years now (3 or more). The books have outgrown the shelf dedicated to them, so I've been meaning to weed them out for a while. I got started on Monday, when I rounded up every "for sale" book I could find and piled them all next to the desk. Sorry, no pictures. There were more than I thought - there are 100 or so listed on Half, and some aren't listed there at all.

So now I'm going through a book at a time, checking the last-sold price on Half and the number of copies listed. Some books aren't going to sell, at least at a price that won't lose me money. Those are the ones with hundreds of copies listed at Half and Amazon, often with a few dozen listed for less than 10 cents. One book, no kidding, had over 1,000 copies listed at Amazon. With Amazon's commission and fees, I can't list any book there for less than $3.75 unless I want to lose money on it. Unfortunately, that's where most of my sales come from these days. The stack of books to donate, trade, or otherwise dispose of is growing. It's about equal to the stack of books that may sell at a decent price.

After this, all the sale books should fit back on that shelf. The others? Well, there's a used bookstore in town that takes trade-ins. For the ones they don't want, there's BookCrossing, PaperbackSwap, and the Friends of the Library. Or the recycling bin, because the odds of anyone wanting a copy of the Sybex Windows 98 Quick Reference Guide are probably pretty darn astronomical.

And of course, while I have books piled everywhere, my mother and aunt dropped in yesterday. They were in town for Aunt's chemo treatment (breast cancer - this would be the second of Mom's sisters to have it, which doesn't bode well), and Mom can't be in town without seeing El Burrito. At least they didn't seem visibly shocked by the mess. :)

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