If you are like me you may tend to collect things over the years.  I recently discovered my hot wheels collection that I would love to pass on to my 6 year old son, but he seems more interested in noggin and nick jr right now.  We all have those things in our homes we just can’t seem to throw away.  I know for me one of the things that would motivate me to get rid of some of that stuff is if I could make some money getting rid of it.  Generating extra cash especially in this economy is always a good idea.  Who couldn’t use an extra $200 – $300?  One of the ways you can generate some extra cash and un-clutter your house is by selling used books.  College students have been doing this for years and I know when I was in college I couldn’t wait to unload my 30 pound art history text book, no offense to you art lovers out there.

In a recent glance of my bookshelf I found many books that I have collected over the years.  Some I’ve read, some I promised myself I would read and some that I have never touched since I bought it from the bookstore.   Would people actually want to buy some of these books?  Since I needed to find an answer to this question I did what most people do when they want information, go to the search engines, so I went to google.  I did a search on sell used books and found 124,000,000 results.  This told me that there is a market for selling used books.  As a business person once I know there is a market I need to then find out how much money could I make selling these books.

In my searching I found a neat little site called Bookscouter. The way the site works is simple.  Put in your books ISBN number and you will be able to compare different websites to know what they will pay for your particular book.   This is a great time saver and because they rank the sites you can get a quick idea of which sites are better than others.  I also found a great post on this topic on moolanomy.com, click here to see the post.  You can sell all types of books from novels to old textbooks.  However textbooks lose their value very quickly, so if you graduated 20 years ago you will be hard pressed to find someone who wants those books.

Some people have taken this a step further and have turned this into a side business.  Now if you are looking to get rich quick or get rich at all this may not be the answer however it can be a nice way of just staying ahead of your bills or paying for an evening out or a vacation.  A recent post on wisebread the author stated she made about $12-$14 per hour selling books on the weekend.  Again this type of income is not enough to make you rich but if you can un-clutter your house and make some money at the same time then that is what I consider a win-win propsotion.