Scan

Most scanning services check the prices offered for a book on online auction sites like eBay and Amazon.com and present the range of prices a given title has brought in over the past three months, as well as giving an indication of whether the price has been rising or falling during that time and how brisk the title’s sales have been. It’s a good first step in pricing, but, of course, it’s only a first step.

Antique

Book

Sellers

Scanners can’t help much with antique books or books in custom bindings. The sites they tap into seldom (if ever) list information on the condition of books offered at varying price points. So, the next step in our process is checking with individual antiquarian booksellers, art appraisers, historians, rare book librarians, and subject-area experts.

Our

Staff

Our volunteer staff also brings a great deal of personal experience to the task of pricing. We’re lucky to have librarians, antique dealers, gallery and museum staff, and historians in our ranks. No item on our shelves is assigned a price arbitrarily. All of this expertise goes toward finding what price our donated books are bringing at auction. As a general rule, once we determine the comparable going rate for a book we set our price at half that going rate: we’re a non-profit, staffed by volunteers, and we get all of our stock free through donation. We can afford to offer such steep discounts, and dealers from all around the country come to our sale to take advantage of those discounts.