WHAT WE PAY:

We usually pay about one-third of what we expect to price a book. On scarcer and more in-demand titles, we sometimes go as high as half our expected price. In simpler days, when the standard for a used book store was to price almost all titles about one-half the in-print price, our cash offer was usually 17%, sometimes as much as 25%, of the new-book price. With the advent of the internet, though, prices vary so radically that the one-half-of-in-print-price standard is no longer realistic on many books. We still usually pay one-third of what we expect to price a book, but that isn't always as tied to the in-print price as it used to be. In general, we feel trade paperbacks, especially trade paperbacks from academic presses, have held their value better than hardbacks, especially hardbacks from commercial presses, so our offers on good trade paperbacks are more likely to bear a direct relationship to in-print prices. Of course, some titles that are easy to find in paperback are quite scarce in hardback, so the opposite could be true on them, but that's a very limited number of titles. Hardback fiction, if we buy it at all, is especially problematic. We often feel, based on prevailing used book prices, that we have to price a hardback novel less than we'd price a trade paperback of the same title, so our offer on it, if we make one, has to be correspondingly conservative.

In short, on books we'd price at half the in-print price, we usually pay about 17% of the in-print price, but that can vary a lot.

This sounds like a lot of margin, and it is, but remember that everything we buy we own. Unlike a new-book store, we can't return anything to our sources, and we have no current best-sellers to carry the slower titles. In our business, you're always buying more than you're selling; it's how you grow, and how you stay interesting doing it.

PLEASE REMEMBER, if you have books to sell, to call first: (617) 229-5644.