Like the rest of the world, colleges have gone digital, though the change is a fairly recent one. When I was an undergrad in 2013, almost all of my assignments were handed in on paper, but in grad school in 2023, everything is submitted online. In just a decade, much of my coursework has gone digital—but not all of it.
While sometimes I can work from a PDF or rent an “e(text)book,” I still have to buy real ones sometimes. They haven’t gotten any cheaper over the last 10 years. That means that even as more of your coursework and assignments have moved online, you might still end a semester looking to sell your textbooks. Here’s where and how to do it—and when you can’t.
Selling physical books
First, your college bookstore might buy physical books back from you, but per The College Investor, they probably won’t give you much money back. You can try in-person retail shops like Half Price Books or your local bookstore too, or you can go online.
Use BooksRun if you just want to declutter and get some money. Enter the book’s ISBN or title on the homepage and confirm the book you want to offload. You’ll get a printable shipping label so you don’t have to cover that cost, then you’ll just send the book off. Once it’s been processed, you’ll get a check or a PayPal deposit.
Use Book Finder if you want the best rate. The site aggregates offers from a variety of bookstores, so you might be able to find one that’s willing to pay more than others for your used texts—plus shipping is covered for you once again.
Use Book Scouter if you’re not in a hurry and want to make top dollar. This site allows vendors to bid on your book, so you get to choose to whom you ultimately sell it. It even has a mobile app where you can scan your text’s barcode to get it uploaded for sale with minimal effort.
What and when to sell
Selling at the right time is important. The College Investor says the “peak dates” for resale have historically been May 4 through June 15, and identified May 11, May 18, and May 27–30 as the best days this year.
You can sell at any time, though, and will also have some luck at the beginning of the semester, when students are just finding out what books they’ll need in the next few weeks. If you’re selling at the start of a term instead of the end, consider listing the texts on direct marketplaces like Facebook or Craigslist. Skipping working with intermediaries and selling directly to someone searching for that title will likely net you a better price too.
You usually can’t sell digital textbooks
Now, the bad news: If your class uses digital textbooks, you can’t really sell those, even if you “bought” them yourself. BooksRun explains on its blog that licensing concerns are to blame: The company that sold you the digital text has no way of knowing if you made a copy of it somehow, so they don’t want you selling a book you also have saved to a hard drive somewhere.
A big difference between digital and physical book copies is that physical copies degrade over time. The hardcover you’re trying to offload probably has some bent pages, a cracked spine, or notes in the margins. It rode around in your backpack for weeks or got coffee spilled on it during a late-night study session. An eBook, on the other hand, stays pristine forever, and the companies that distribute them believe that luxury should come with a price. In short, they don’t want you selling them, so there is no marketplace for you to do so.
Moreover, as Direct Textbook outlines, you didn’t actually buy your digital textbook; you bought the license to use it. You just own the right to look at the materials, not the digital text itself. The “ownership” of an ebook is more similar to the ownership of software than to owning a physical book. You can’t sell your licensed copy of Microsoft Word to someone, and you can’t sell your ebook, either.
That means if you want to make money back on your textbooks, you’ll have to buy the physical copies at the start of each semester, and it’s up to you to decide if the ease of digital access outweighs your desire to get a little extra money back after final exams.
