Older or rare books:

Books published prior to the 1970s will not exhibit an ISBN number. These books will require greater research to establish a proper pricing and an accurate description. There are two sources of information that you will use regularly: the Internet, and your reference library. Online sources are helpful when you want to check out current market prices for your books and look for information regarding the publisher, author, or edition. Personal reference libraries are great for hard-to-find titles, and it would be helpful to stock the titles recommended at start a research library.

On the Internet, you can look up your books on individual marketplaces like Amazon, Ebay, Abe, and Alibris. You will probably find one or two that you really like. Our research always begins at Amazon. We use scouting tools that provide us with Amazon statistics, so it has become a very comfortable tool for us over the years. Amazon statistics can be misleading on rare books that are not everyday sales but may have a great deal of value. This is why we also use another online research tool called BookFinder.com. This is a wonderful search tool that looks up books on many book sales sites and provides detailed information with links to the search results. You can specify that you only want to see used, new, signed, out-of-print, or first editions. This is a powerful tool that lets you gather incredible market-price information with only a few keystrokes.

No amount of Internet sleuthing can replace the tried and true home research library. It is important to add books to your library that cover the genres that you sell. We have compiled a list of the books in our library that we use regularly on start a bookselling research library.

Next lesson, Does condition matter?