Let me start by stating that eBay is a terrible place for booksellers to buy inventory (great for selling books though). BUT… if you are desperate there are potentially a few ways to get inventory on eBay.

Arbitrage – there are certain titles that regularly sell for hundreds of dollars (even $1,000′s) on eBay such as Margin of Safety by Seth  Klarman.  I have bought this title for a few hundred bucks and listed for $1050 and sold it at best offer for $900 a few times – making a decent profit after commissions.  Plus it generally sells fast.  This works if you have the cash to tie up in one book.  There are likely dozens of more books that you can arbitrage if you do your homework.

Bulk Lots – Be very careful here.  Do not buy books by the pound or anything like that.  Don’t buy boxes (or gaylords) of books that are “unsorted” any decent bookseller could fill up one of these without sorting the books.  You can find people selling their online inventory and closing up shop.  These sellers will have spreadsheets of their inventory available for you to review – if they do not then take a pass.

You can have eBay send you emails of your favorite searches – I have them send me an email every time Margin of Safety comes up for sale.

There are also certain sellers who have pristine feedback that often have large (dozens of boxes) for sale and these lots really are “unsorted” but I do not like the randomness of it.  You will have to do your homework here.

This is not going to be  a long post because eBay just does not provide great opportunities for booksellers to find inventory – though if you slog through it you may come up with some winners.

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.