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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to give away print books, let alone resell them.

This is true, for all but a minority of titles and editions imo. I have probably a couple of hundred hardcover and paperback and most of them nobody really wants. Collectively they are also quite heavy and difficult to transport from place to place. We haven't moved in a number of years but the last time we did my crates of books made up a significant portion of the total load weight. In the end I will probably sell a very few volumes that have a little value, give away a few more, and dispose of the rest.

I’ve found this to be the case too, especially mass market paperbacks. Book resellers aren’t interested, libraries are better (but they’ll also occasionally turn them away).

I have not found this to be the case with anything but old tech and pulp novels.

Setup a Little Free Library, almost everything I put in my goes.

hmm, I buy 1 or 2 printed books every month, and I try to buy Used when Possible, it is just cheaper

That's the buyer's perspective though. I buy used books as well although I'll often actually pay a premium for an eBook because I have the most reading time when I'm traveling.

But selling low cost goods as an occasional thing is incredibly time consuming for the return. In the past I sold on Ebay every now and then and basically came to the conclusion that unless I was making $50+ on a transaction it just wasn't worth the hassle. Books are easier in general but they also are usually a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

If only that was true. Tell it to the Amazon subsidiary 'ABE books' and their customers who buy and sell secondhand books via booksellers worldwide.

If you're willing to keep the book in storage indefinitely and ship it anywhere in the world that improves your odds. If you just want the library to take your old books you might have worse luck.

My local library has a book sale every year. I don't give them trash like outdated software manuals but I take them some bags of books over the course of a year to at least offset any new books I bring in. I'm sure a lot of them end up getting pulped anyway but at least I've tried to give them new homes. No way I'm going to the trouble of trying to sell books (or anything else for a few dollars) at a sub-minimum wage value of my time.

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