Is there an app on the iPhone that can take the place of your pda book scanner and book scouting software? Almost but not quite yet though it is clear the capability is there. So do not cancel your book scouting subscription and throw away your PDA yet. Hopefully the day will come soon when you can.

There are several apps for the iPhone that try to replicate a scanner by taking a photo or video of a barcode and transmit back price info. These scanning apps will often have trouble reading a barcode and the info they give back isn’t all the info booksellers need. Amazon has their own app that when you take a photo of an item it emails you back the info – this is a bit slow if you are at a library sale but okay if you are just out at one of your book buying haunts. SnapTell is another app that is pretty good and like the Amazon app it is free.

If you have an iPhone it is clear the capability is there to provide an application that will be able to integrate with the Amazon database and provide Amazon sales rank info, book conditions and price info. At the very least the app would enable you to download the database and be able to get the info you want from it the catch is going to be getting the isbn’s entered into the iPhone quickly.

The camera on the new iPhone has been improved and hopefully we are close to seeing the potential uses for booksellers come to fruition.

I recently wrote about some of the tools Ebay provides to sellers and one of their best is the ability to allow buyers to put out “Best Offers” on items. I wanted to highlight this feature and how it comes into play using Amazon Sales Rank.

Yesterday I sold two items using Ebay’s Best Offer. Both were sold for less than the current lowest price the item was listed for on Amazon but based on each items sales rank I accepted. Here are both items:

• Photoshop CS3 Sharpening Images (CD Rom) – listed for $89 with a Amazon Sales Rank of #1,643,176.  The CD was listed for sale on 12/18/08. I accepted a Best Offer on Ebay of $50.  My cost was $4 to buy the CD.
• UVB Instrumentation and Applications-  listed for $68 with a Amazon Sales Rank of #3,783,937 .   The book was listed for sale on by me on 10/13/08.  I accepted a Best Offer on Ebay of $50.  My cost was $3 to buy the book.

Did I leave some money on the table?  Possibly – especially with the Photoshop CD but look at those sales ranks.  When would be the next time I even get interest in them?  The UVB book could sit in inventory for a couple of years before it sells.  Remember over time the price of your books will likely drop in terms of other sellers under-pricing you which is to say that you may not ever get your asking price anyway.

This is why I always use Best Offer because of the flexibility it gives me.  I do not have to accept the first offer.  Many buyers likely expect you to counter with a higher offer so it makes sense to do so.  For the two books above I saw a quick $100 in sales with some monster profits on slow selling inventory so I just accepted the offers.

What would you have done?  Let me knw

Though this time of year is great for building your inventory it sure is lousy for selling it.  The average number of books I am selling is on the decline as it always is after Memorial Day.  Thankfully some big ticket items are selling (just sold a $1,000 partial set of the Encyclopedia Judaica).  The New York Times reported in today’s business section that book sales are down across the industry.  Publishers and retailers all report fewer sales.  Now this time of year is always slow for your typical online bookseller since we generally do not sell the hot beach reads.  Couple that with an industry is off then what is one to do.

• Hopefully all you booksellers plan ahead for slower summer sales and take some of the higher earning from December-February and allocate it for these months so you can keep up with buying inventory.  Both Microsoft and Quicken offer free accounting software that you can use to help with planning ahead and managing your financials. Quicken’s software is the standard that most people use but both are fine.
• Cull your inventory – going through it and de-listing the stuff that has dropped too low in price.
• Re-price more often and more aggressively if cash flow is an issue. 
• Re-visit your expenses – check all your subscriptions and services – shop around some of their competitors may offer the same services for less.  Look around for deals on shipping supplies etc.
• Branch out – if you are doing this from home – there are a myriad of ways to make money online – start doing some research but do not dive in head first in something new.  I wrote an guide about selling books online to help add some monthly revenue (you can sign up for a coupon for it in the upper right of this blog).  In a future post (coming soon) I will talk about some other ideas for branching out.

Friends of Library Sales are starting to peak now (with the exception of this weekend).  If going to book sales and elbowing people is your thing now is the time to map out your calendar – check out www.booksalefinder.com – to find your local sales. 

I don’t go to book sales much anymore but you can slowly build up your inventory by going to them.  The downside to Friend of Library sales is that they are overrun with other booksellers with their scanner many of whom work in teams.  I would often see people running into the sale and indiscriminately  scooping up armfuls of books  and putting them into bags then running to a blanket where there partner is and doing it again.  There would be no selection process – just a mad rush which would mean if you were not on of the first on line you find many books gone (and piled up on someones blanket).

I remember one sale where someone had hundreds of books piled up on a blanket after they had run like crazy through the sale – at the end of it they had hundreds of discards left laying on the grass in a pile after they had scanned them all.  Me – I would be happy to leave with 30 good books.

I hate having to get to the sales 90 minutes early to get a decent place online.  When you get in there is barely any space to move let alone put your books down.  God forbid if the place where the sale was used air conditioning too.  Also – many sales will cherry pick some titles out and put them online themselves.

This has turned into a big gripe on library sales but let me back up and restate that you can find books at them and often find some treasures at them that make it all worthwhile.  I found some rare physics texts that sold for hundreds of dollars at one sale.  These books were sitting there well after the intial mad rush but had been bypassed because they were old  (from the early sixties and pre-isbn)

Anyway – if Friend of Library sales are your thing then Good Luck and Good Hunting.

How Do Penny Book Sellers Make Money?  I am not sure if they do – if they do make a profit it is minimal a few cents at most.  Lets break down a penny sale on Amazon and see how it works.  Lets assume the seller is a Pro Merchant on Amazon and pays the $40 monthly fee.

Let’s assume the book weighs less than 1lb for shipping purposes

$4.00 – is the amount collected by Amazon – this is the $.01 plus the $3.99 standard shipping charge.

($1.35) – is the amount Amazon takes out of the shipping leaving $2.65.

($2.38) – the amount to ship a book that weighs 1lb or less via media mail as of today.

Potential profit $.27.  Twenty-Seven Cents - not factoring in other expenses such as labels, envelopes, internet, time spent listing and shipping and all the other subscription fees that make up your overhead.  So lets say a penny seller can make $.20 on each sale.  You would need to sell 500 books a day to make $100 a day at that rate – which means you are going to have to have someone help you prep all those books for shipping further eating into your profits. 

 Does this make sense as a business model – not to me.  Understand though – this is their business model – penny sellers are not by accident.  So they must be ok with those lousy margins.  Maybe the penny sellers do not value their time properly and are ok with stuffing 500 envelopes with books for $.20 each.

Sellers of books for a penny are the worst – they clutter Amazon with the junk listings with no descriptions but they do make money and so does Amazon.  Remember – Amazon makes $1.35 for every penny book sold.