Generally speaking, you won’t get such a good price for books on eBay as on Amazon (ignoring transaction costs which I can’t be bothered to work out).

I love buying through Amazon buy it used (my Beloved calls it “Amazon Born Again”) and I’ve often thought I should turn it all around and sell it again…but I think about envelopes and postage and labels and I feel so tired.

I used to give them away Shrink, I gave away over a thousand about 4 years ago, and I am in the middle of another purge now. I still do give away the ones that are either too old to list or too cheap to be worth it. This selling on Amazon thing is new to me, and I find it interesting. Surely the ultimate confirmation that a book is cheap traash is if it lists for a penny on Amazon?

My criteria for keeping a book tends to be “how hard will this be to replace, and am I likely to want to replace it”.

Thanks both for reading and commenting.

Aphra.

This is fine with medical textbooks, where students or junior doctors can welcome some text I’ve unearthed at home recently through moving house. Some books are dropped of by drug reps and invariably find their way to my SHO (erm, ST1 now).

Most fiction goes to one of 3 friends after I’ve read it, unless my wife or I really really believe we will read it again in the future. We used to keep them thinking we might read them again but simply ran out of space.

Non-fiction I pass on to who ever I reckon will enjoy it most. This has got me in hot water before though . . . it’s well worth being cautious in passing on the wife’s diet and lifestyle nonsense books . . .

One of them is “set up as a seller on eBay”. So far eBay has been a way to get hold of all those Star Wars toys my parents couldn’t afford when I was small. I got them, stroked them, appreciated the physical contact, then realised they’re just useless lumps of plastic and gave them away almost immediately to a six year old who has so many toys they meant very little to him. Lately I’ve also been buying bits of lego to make into stop motion movies.

Another thing on my list is “sort comics for sale”. A colleague from a previous job had a clear out, and simply gave much of his stuff away. To me he gave comics. For literally years, he bought two of every copy of 2000AD, the popular British sf comic, home of Judge Dredd. Two copies, because one got read, and the other got put in a plastic bag and kept mint. I now have them all in boxes in my loft, and its my intention to read them all once then sell the lot in packs of 10.

Yeah right.

But if you get the pleasure from flogging books, consider eBay, where you can flog anything short of firearms and body parts.