As I have mentioned before I am on a mission to purge a lot of stuff from my life. Especially items that I no longer have use for.

Over the years I had accumulated a fairly large collection of books. I only ever read them once but I just liked to have a copy of each book I read. This even went to the level of me picking up a couple of books from a second hand shop with no intention of ever reading them…

I had read a lot of books while travelling. Some I boxed up and sent home—another wasted cost looking back—but others I either borrowed or left behind when moving on. One such book was The Beach by Alex Garland—the subsequent film was OK but the book was much better. Everyone seemed to be reading that book so I borrowed it off a friend and really enjoyed it. So much so I decided to pick up a copy when I got home just to sit on my shelf and gather dust…

Anyway you get the picture, I had a pretty large collection of books, some paperback and some hardback, that I wanted to get rid of so I thought I would simply sell them online.

Something that came as a bit of a surprise to me was the fact that books no longer seem to be worth anything!

My idea to sell them all just simply wasn’t possible. With hardback books I was expecting to get something around £1. I looked after my books and most of them were pretty much pristine so I thought this should be pretty easy…

The first issue is the postage. As hardback books as quite weighty they require a fair bit of postage. This can instantly make the price comparable to brand new books, which sell with postage included on sites like Amazon. Not many people are willing to buy second-hand if there are only saving a few pence…

The main problem though is the competition. There seems to be a glut of second-hand books. Pretty much every book I tried to sell, unless it was pretty much a brand new release, was available second hand for 1p + P&P on Amazon! They must make their money through the postage value but how can anyone compete with that?

Ebay is pretty much the same as there are just so many books out there they just don’t hold any value any more. I did have a minor success when selling the complete Dark Tower series of Stephen King paperbacks as one job lot. Overall though it didn’t add up to very much per book…

In the end I gave up and just donated most of them instead…

It just seems like such a shame. One more reason to stick to my Kindle in future…

Image: Pete O’Shea