Book Scouting
Book scouting can be a profitable business, either buying for yourself to resell, or working for someone else. The tools of the trade can be quite expensive however, and may put a few first time book scouts off. You may see such tools as hand held bar code scanners that look up the price of the book. These scanners generally come in two flavors, the standalone version (very expensive) or the kind that attaches to your cell phone (less expensive, but still pricey). There is, however, a third option that you may not know about:
You can look up book prices right from your web enabled phone.
If you have internet access on your phone you can simply go to your favorite site and look up the book of interest. The problem with this approach has been that generally, it takes a long time for a web page to load on your phone. Also, if you do not have a phone with a full featured web browser, you were generally out of luck.
At BookSpy.net we have implemented a search feature just for book scouts that alleviates this problem. In addition, most mobile phones with data access should work. Just point your mobile device to http://scout.bookspy.net/ to access the mobile version of our site. You can enter an ISBN, Title or Author and get concise, easy to read results. You will receive the Amazon Sales Rank
, and the lowest prices from a number of vendors including Amazon, eBay, Half.com, Alibris and more. Best of all, as part of our grand opening, we are providing this service for FREE to users of our site.
Hopefully this will help prospective book sellers get up and running, and keep your business profitable!