Help me be the a better bookscout

March 26, 2008 5:03 PM

What's the best book scouting equipment setup?

I'm thinking about getting serious about book scouting. I have done a bit of it and have had some success. I want to kick it up a notch and start using a scanner to check prices before I buy items. Are any mefites book scouts, and if so, what does your rig look like? I found a few on the web (Scoutpal, asellertool) but they look overpriced and wonky.

posted by cosmicbandito to technology (3 comments total)

I've had good luck with the web based search from asellertool and my cell. It is a really low barrier to entry and is good if you already have a data plan from your cell provider.

I'm looking at starting my own scouting site for books and other media. Let me know if you would be interested in trying it out.
posted by the biscuit man at 10:28 PM on March 26

When we went to a church book sale a couple of months ago here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the first 20 or so people in line were book scouts. They were a greasy, disheveled, disreputable-looking bunch, all male. My impression was that at least a couple had slept in their cars. The books were going for 50 cents up to two dollars, I believe, so the potential for buying low and selling high was large.

The scouts had a wide variety of gear and tactics. A couple had PDAs with bar-code readers, pre-loaded with sales information (according to what I could see over their shoulders). These only worked on the newer books. There was a lot of looking up books by title or by manually entering the ISBN because many of the books did not have scannable bar codes.

One scout simply looked at each book as quickly as he could, shrugged if he thought the book surely must be worth something, and shoved it in his bags. Lots of bags. Some of these guys probably went out with hundreds of books. The mad rush at the beginning made me believe that this fellow probably got better deals than the fellows with PDAs. He was shoveling books into his bags, while the PDA guys were going through lookup times that, while they were only a few seconds at most, really slowed them down. The cost per-book was so low that it behooved them just to go by gut instinct.

I don't know if all such sales are like this, but the mad rush at the beginning was like Macy's on Christmas Eve, an hour before closing, when they've just taken delivery of a truckload of the latest Toy of the Year. There's no time to waste in farting around: you've just got to start claiming books.

A couple of the guys seemed pretty intent on specific kinds of books. A couple seemed to go for art books. Another seemed to be looking for cookbooks. Another was spending time with the CDs and albums. Another seemed to be looking for fiction. They were frantic, grabby, and all elbows.
posted by Mo Nickels at 6:11 AM on March 27

New Jersey used book sales are just like Mo Nickels talks about in the post above. A mad rush of dealers for the first 2 hours. The good ones come with one or two helpers that search different topics for them, as they search as well. Hard Cover Books usually go for $1 or $2 dollars each. Some sales do not allow scanners. Others have a "Preview Day" the first day of the sale, where you have to pay $20 to enter. All the dealers shop here. I do see more people using scanners, but they slow you down. The best book dealers that I have come across don't need scanners. After visiting lots of sales and used book stores, and reading up on the book trade, you won't need them either. You just get a feel of what is a good book and what the return profit is going to be.
Happy Hunting!
posted by blast at 8:32 AM on March 27