Scouting for books is like searching for lost treasure. You walk into a thrift store or used bookstore and somewhere in those ten thousand books there are a few dozen with a great deal of value. In the next several lessons, we will be looking at the ways that the book scouter can narrow down his or her search to find the most value in books in the least amount of time.

We will discuss the proper use of scouting tools and some of our own experiences and technique, in the lesson Scoutpal and PDA scanner use.

In the next lesson, we will address the math behind the scouting. This is an important lesson because finding books with value is great, but knowing what that value means to your bottom line is even better. That will be in the lesson, Buying books, the math.

The following six lessons will be dealing with where you should look for quality book-stock and what kinds of books to look for. These topics begin on Buying books, where?.

Next we will look at researching your book finds. This is an important step in the process and will take some practice. In time you will find that this a rewarding and very pleasant activity that will make each scouting trip more profitable than the last. We will look at these topics in Book research.

The final lesson in this section deals with assessing the condition of books while scouting. There are some general guidelines that we lay out dealing with the condition of our purchases. This lesson is called Does condition matter?

Next lesson, Scoutpal and PDA scanner use.