 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event or a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you want to call us. We are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. All of our shows are recorded, however, and posted onto our website, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website, Encompass Live website, and find all our recordings, the presentations that are included for any presentations people did, links to websites related to the show. We post that all on our website. Our shows, both our live shows and our recorded shows are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with any of your colleagues out there. And we do a mixture of things here. There's many training sessions, interviews, demos, basically anything library related. We are happy to have it on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations, and we sometimes bring on guest speakers. As we have, and that's what we have this morning, on the line with us is Cecilia Lawrence, who is the director of the North Platte Public Library, just westernish Nebraska Central Western, I guess we'd call that, right? I would definitely call it western. Western, okay, yeah. We're past Grand Island, so there you go. Yes, more on the western side of the state of Nebraska, yeah. And she's going to presentation her topic today, the title, Getting More Money from Your Book Sales, or Is This Old Book Valuable? This is a session that Cecilia had presented at our Nebraska Library Association and School Librarians Association State Conference last fall, and very popular topics. I thought it would be great to have her on the show, so we brought her online remotely to tell us how to make a lot of money off of our books, hopefully. Yes, I sure hope so. All right, go ahead and take it away, Cecilia. Well, you know, thank you for having me. This is just an awesome forum, and I'm so happy to be here. But, you know, as librarians, we know that rare books can sell for hundreds, thousands, even millions of dollars. But the question is, what factors turn a book, the most common of a household item, into something of value? Well, there isn't a single hard and fast rule, and usually it's a combination of factors that give a book some sort of value. Well, every year our friends of the library that we hold two book sales, and they tend to make between $3,500 and $6,000. But we know that some buyers were getting rare first edition books for a dollar or less. And while that's great for that buyer, as I was one of them, I will say that the friends was missing out on potentially hundreds of dollars because we weren't pricing some of these old books correctly. We were just putting them in with the rest of our donations and selling them. And my little find that I got that really got us onto this was after we got this large estate that came in, I found a first edition, first American printing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles from 1902. And when I went online and found books that were in comparable condition, it was actually worth between $375 and $425 in the same condition that I had purchased it in for $0.50. Now, while that was a great thing for me, and I still have that book, it made us start reevaluating how we did our book sales to try and capture as much revenue as we can. And so I started evaluating and pricing rare and potentially valuable items. And now we do it year round as our donations come in. Our friends of the library members, they have always done the pre-sorting of the donated books and library discards into broad subject headings. So we simply just added another category for old and rare items. So they would separate it into that box, and then I would go through that box as we got ready for our book sales. And as I've done this now for several years, we implemented a procedure to evaluate and set a price on these items. And I'm kind of going to take you through our procedure of what we do in trying to find out if you have a book that might be valuable. So today I'm going to share with you the tips and tricks that you need to know to determine if you have a valuable book based on several different criteria. We're going to look at some of the online tools that are available. And I'm also going to give you an option of what to do with books that don't sell at your book sale that you can also utilize to create even more revenue. So let's get started. Well, the evaluation criteria that we're going to talk about are scarcity, importance, author, addition, condition, age, aesthetics, and association. And of all of these criteria, I can tell you the two that are the most important criteria are the addition and the condition of the item that comes into you. So let's start with scarcity. Is the book hard to find? Because only a few copies exist. Typically before the internet, if you've got that gone with the wind, you are just sure it was the first edition and that it was valuable because it was the only one. Well, the advent of the internet has shown us that many books that we thought were really scarce really aren't as scarce as we thought they were. And a good example of true scarcity would be the first American edition of Moby Dick because the majority of editions were destroyed in a warehouse fire. Publishers can also create artificial scarcity by printing small numbers of copies, a limited edition, in order to create desirability. And we've run into that several times when in books that have come in or you get limited editions or numbered editions, which certainly do increase value and certainly make a book worth more than $0.50 or $1. And another criteria is importance. Does the book have any social significance that makes it desirable? Did it influence literature like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or politics like Marxist das Kapital? In most cases, the earliest copy is the most desirable, which is the true first edition. We're going to talk about editions and true first editions here in just a moment. But the next criteria I want to cover is authors. Collectors want to own books by successful authors. And usually it is the earliest edition they want the most. If the author has signed a book, that is going to push up its value. The death of a major author can also push up prices as well. Certainly the more an author signs books, it doesn't make the signature quite as valuable. But in my experience, it definitely has contributed to the value increasing of some of our rare books that have come in. So let's talk about edition. Now, if you're a collector and you are wanting to collect books, you're going to want the first edition, first printing of a book in the best condition that you can find it. And in most cases, if it has a dust jacket, and most of the books we're talking about will, you will want that dust jacket. And you want the dust jacket in as good a condition as possible. But when you're talking about the edition, everybody wants a first edition. And that means the title's first appearance. Later editions and reprints typically just don't have the same appeal as that first edition. However, there are a few exceptions. Let's look at the book I have here on the screen, which is The Grapes of Wrath. It has been purchased by many different publishers, published many, many, many times, hardback, paperback. And the original first edition is the one on the left side of your screen in the white box. That is the true first edition in hardback. That is the original dust jacket cover illustration. And to find that original hardback with its dust jacket in good condition is what makes a valuable book. The other paperback books are worth a dollar or less. They just don't have the same value if you're a collector. If you're somebody who's just looking to read this book, any reading copy is full suffice. And of course, most buyers aren't going to pay the premium price for a first edition. So let's talk about how do you figure out if you've got a first edition? Because being able to correctly identify a first edition can greatly impact the value of the book. So let's start with modern day practices. You might get lucky. And the publisher may actually state, this is a first edition. And they'll print that right on the page. However, just stating the word first edition or first printing is only a style that has been used since World War II. And I will say most of the books that we question, do we have a valuable book, are pre-1940s. So this is still great because you may have some rare addition of a more modern book. And again, you're selling it for $0.50 when you could be getting more money out of those books as well. But again, going back to this first edition, when you're looking at these a little closer, you'll notice the number line. And we're used to seeing this. We're librarians. We've seen the copyright page here. And I know that I never paid a lot of attention to the number line that was on the page. But it is of true significance to the addition and the printing of that particular item. And when you're looking at the number line, if there is a number one in that sequence, it usually, almost always, will indicate a first edition. This confirms the fact that this is actually a first printing of the first edition of this particular book. Of interesting, when you're looking at the line numbers, the line sequences, they can ascend or descend or even not have any discernible order, depending on the publisher. This is unique to each publisher. And they all use something a little bit different. All of these examples on your screen are considered first editions because they have the number one in their line. Well, sometimes, the number line is also accompanied by the words first edition, like you saw in the example a slide ago. But you need to be careful because sometimes the publishers leave the words first edition on, even when the book is in its third printing. And that is reflected in this particular book. Basically, they didn't go back and change the copyright page to take off first edition that words. They just changed the line number with the printing. Or it could be that this is a nonfiction textbook, still a first edition, but it's a third printing. Again, a collector will not pay as much money for a third printing as they will first edition first printing. So it is important to pay attention to those number lines if you have them. The number line on this particular page shows that you've got a low number of the number of two on the right-hand side of your screen. And 79 is the highest number, which is in the middle of the line there. The lowest of the higher numbers is 75. In this particular publisher, the two indicates that this is the second printing, and the lowest number is actually a year, meaning 1975. So it's actually indicating the years. So if you're wondering, well, how on earth am I going to know what they are really talking about, there is actually a resource I'm going to show you when I get to that slide. But the website is quillandbrushbooks, or qbbooks.com. And they actually have a tremendous online help. They have gone through and taken every publisher and will give you hints and tips to identify if you have a first edition or not. But these are some of the things when you're looking to sell your books online or you're just evaluating them to price them for your book sale, addition is very important. And after addition, the next most important thing is condition. And if house buying is about location, location, location, then rare book buying is about condition, condition, condition. And the condition includes the presence and condition of a dust jacket. In some editions, and this is kind of hard to read here, but that's actually the great Gatsby. The presence of the dust jacket is the defining aspect in assessing this book's value. The book on the left with no dust jacket is worth maybe $1, maybe $2. If you've got the dust jacket, that price, even the dust jacket in the condition, as you see here on the right, will jack that price up to $15 to $20. The better condition that your book and your dust jacket is in will drive the price up even higher. So again, the dust jacket is important in assessing a book's value. And you'll definitely want to include that in your consideration when you're putting a value on a book. Condition is very subjective. But understanding the grading system of the book will help you determine its value. Booksellers and book collectors alike expect you to use this grading system condition. As new, the book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. This could be the description for a book that's been lost in a warehouse for years and never shelved, thumb through, or even open. And it could still be many years old. Fine, designated by an F or an FN, a fine book approaches the condition of as new, but it's not quite as crisp. The book may have been opened and maybe even read gently, but there are no visible defects to the book, the jacket, or its pages. They're still crisp and white. Very good describes a book that does show some small signs of wear, but no tears in either the binding or the paper or the dust jacket. Any defects that you have should be noted by the seller. Good. And most of the books that we get in that are in decent shape are good, fair, good, and very good. But good describes the average used worn book that has all its pages and leaves presence. A fair is a worn book that has complete text, including any maps and plates, but may lack the end papers, again, which shall be noted if you're selling it online. The binding and dust jacket can also be worn, and you can describe those defects. A poor condition, and we do get poor books in here, and it's amazing sometimes even a book in poor condition because it's scarce, may still have value. But poor describes a book that is sufficiently worn. It may have missing maps. It may have missing plates. It may have pages that are torn, soiled, scuffed, stained, spotted. It may have loose joints or hinges. Again, that should all be described if you're selling it. A binding copy is basically a page in which the pages and leaves are intact, but the binding may have come completely apart, is very bad, or is non-existent. You may just have the text of the book. And a reading copy, of course, is generally poor to fair condition. But it's basically a copy that somebody would want to read, but really doesn't have any value beyond the actual text. So those are the condition ratings. But then it goes even further into further descriptors that indicate why you've given it the rating that you have. And some of those other descriptors are listed here. And the ones that I run into most often are bumped corners. And we're actually going to show you a description of that. But the corners basically are no longer at a 90 degree angle that they've been dented in. And again, while it's cosmetic, it's minor of true book collector if they're shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars, or even $10, $20, or $30, or $40. It makes a difference to them if the corners are dented in. Chipped is used to describe where small pieces are missing from the edges of the boards, where fraying has occurred on a dust jacket, or the edge of a paperback. Again, very important in describing that to a potential seller. Edgeworn is a condition we see a lot of. And of course, this is the rubbing that you see along the back covers or shelf wear, which is what shows on the bottom of the book. And books have been taken on and off shelves. Definitely are going to be showing some shelf wear. Foxed and foxing is something that I don't see quite as often, but you'll see it in books from the 1800s and earlier. And basically this is the brown spotting of paper, and it's caused by a chemical reaction. And you'll find it especially in books that have steel engravings in them. The oldest book that I've received here in our library was from 1753, and it actually has a value of almost $1,500. So it's definitely an interesting thing to try and put some value on some of these books. Some of the other descriptions on the grading scale that I have seen most frequently, of course, X library, obviously. The book was once owned by and circulated in a public library. The book could have some of the other characteristics, but more often than not, it's been well used. Library books obviously have library stickers, stamps, barcodes, other types of markings. Any library book needs to be marked X library. And with that said, you would think, well, X library books aren't gonna have much value. I mean, that's why we're getting rid of them. And you'd be right probably about 90% of the time. However, libraries do purchase expensive coffee table books and rare reference works and local history books. And we also buy small publishers that may only publish 20,000 copies or less. So sometimes library books, X library books can have value. I know that our library, we have gotten rid of our reference collection and all of that money that had been invested into those books, some of them we put into our nonfiction circulating collection and we have a very small ready reference collection, the rest of them we put into our book sale. And the ones that were of historical value sold immediately, even at much higher prices. And then they went on to a secondary source and we made money off of them as well. So just because you've got X library copies, don't assume that they're not going to have value. Now, with that said, of course, more fiction books, especially more recent ones like the Twilight series and you're removing them because maybe they are, they're very worn. Again, those aren't gonna have a lot of value. But you'd be surprised that some of your nonfiction, especially books having value. Worming and wormholes, I've seen that as well. Again, you're talking books typically more from the 17 and 1800s or older, but it's definitely something that you need to note if you are seeing that, especially in books that might be more recent. And the last that I'll highlight here that I've seen a lot is Sun. Faded from exposure to light or direct sunlight. And we see this with a lot of our donations, books that have been on bookshelves for years and years and years in a room that had a window that had no curtains on it. And so the front and back of the dust jacket and the book itself are in fantastic condition. But the spine of the book will be incredibly faded and the fading will clear through to the color of the boards on the actual book. So those are some of the things that you're looking for when you're looking at condition. And the last thing of course is, I'll mention is moldy or mildewy books. If you have a book that has spots that are any color except for light brown, the book might have mildew or mold spores. And while it's not impossible to get the mold completely gone from a book, we tend to throw them away immediately because the process to eliminate them is very long. It takes a long time to get all the mold spores out and the longer you keep them in your facility, the higher the likelihood that the mold spores because they're airborne spores are going to transfer from book to book. And we certainly don't want that in our libraries. So in our library, we tend to immediately dispose of books that are showing moldy or mildewy conditions. Now age can also affect scarcity, but it is usually not a critical effect during assessing a book's value. People tend to assume that they have a book that's old, can be from 1930s, 20s, 1900, and they assume it has value. That's not necessarily true. Many old books, old Bibles, old encyclopedia sets, other books that are printed in huge quantities. Every year I see the profit come through in our book sales. Even Life with Father, that was one that was taken from one of ours, you would think that some of these would have some value. They're in fantastic pristine condition, my kids. I bought the encyclopedia set, they've never used it. And I'm sorry to say, most of these books have very little value on the secondary market. They may be in beautiful condition, but of course Bible would have a personal connection to whoever donated it, but most of these unfortunately don't really have a lot of value. And that's why a lot of people try and find other uses for some of these types of books. So another criteria I'm gonna talk to you about is aesthetics. Is your book beautiful? Does it have a gorgeous binding? Has it been illustrated by a famous artist or contained memorable photography? Many book collectors do judge a book by its cover and a pretty book can fetch a pretty price. I have only seen these types of illustrated books in museum and archives. We have never unfortunately gotten a book in like this to our library as a donation, but again, even with this last one showing here on your screen, you can see how bumped and worn the edges of the cover are. And you can clearly see the foxing on that, those the brown areas of the book, but the illustrations that are still in vibrant color will still lend great value to this particular type of book. Books can also gain value by being connected to someone of significance. And the most common occurrences of this is when a book has been owned by and or signed by someone who is important. And of course, most of the things that you're seeing here are of course, some of the authors. However, I will say that in our library, we had a collection of books that was donated by a man of local prominence. His name was Charles McDonald. And he was a prominent homesteading pioneer who was very important to our community. And we probably had about 10 books that had his signature in them. It didn't matter what the book was. People bought that book for $50 to $200 for each book simply because of the association to that homesteading pioneer. The fact that the books were 150 years old also contributed to it, but the books themselves were not the reason that made them valuable. It was the association to that other person. So if you have a beautiful first edition of a book of some importance written by a famous author and yet it is still in great shape, but it may have become hard to find and it was once owned by some of the significance, then you just might have a very valuable book. So I've kind of talked about all the different criteria that we take into account when we're trying to value a book and we certainly use the internet to help us on that path. So here's three websites that I use a lot when I am going through trying to determine value. And I will say of the box of potentially rare and valuable books that I'm given or however many boxes I'm given, I will say about a third of them will end up going back to the book sale for a dollar. They really don't have any value, but the other two thirds typically garner our friends a lot more money in their book sale. But these three online resources that we use, the first one, Abe Books, is the one that I probably spend the most amount of time with when I'm valuing a book. And the reason is because they have an advanced search feature that is absolutely fantastic to help you accurately describe your book and find a good match to help you develop your pricing on that book. A Libris is another website that is also a really excellent website. However, their search interface is not nearly as good and it is really customized for buyers of books, not sellers. And their niche really is for books that have been on the market since 1940. So they're asking you to put in the title and author or an ISBN number. Whereas the Abe Books, I can put in the title, the author, a publisher, I can put in a condition, I can list if it's a first edition, I can put in if it's signed, if it has a dust jacket. The descriptions are really set up for sellers on Abe Books and A Libris, again, is designed for a buyer. But sometimes I'll use both of them when I'm trying to find the value of a book. And in the example I'm gonna use, we're gonna actually go to both of these. The last website is qbbooks.com. That is Quill and Brush Books. I don't use that when I'm searching for a value for books, but it's real value is in the fact that if you have a book and you cannot figure out if it's a first edition, it might be an obscure publisher or it's using a very obscure system. I'm gonna show you one of those here in a minute in our example. This particular website will help guide you into determining if you might potentially have a first edition and or first printing of a book. So this is our book that we're using for our example today. Cecilia, before you go on. It's kind of getting an evaluation. Cecilia, before you go on, we have a question. I'll go back to your different criteria you had there. I think it was under the condition one. Someone wants to know if rebound and rebacked books have any value. How would that affect it? Not as much. And the reason I can tell you that a true book collector will not a rebound or a rebacked book because it's not the original. Now, with that said, I realized that sometimes when all you have, the binding has completely come away from the book and all you have is the middle section and they've sent it to a rebinder like Houchin or some other rebinder. I realized the necessity of that, but for the selling of this, no, it really doesn't. You can look online and add that in as a search criteria in A-Books as rebound and if you were gonna sell it, you would definitely want to note that. But I would say that no, it actually would drive the price down unless it was done by a conservator. Right, yeah. I don't think that's what our person is talking about with the question. But no, it actually pushes the price down. Okay, great, thank you. And just mind if anyone else does have any questions, feel free, type them in that question section of your GoToWebinar interface and I'll grab them and pass them on to Cecilia. All right. Okay. So, this is our example that we're gonna take a look at today. The book is Johnny Appleseed, The Romance of the Sower by Eleanor Atkinson. And this particular book, I took a picture, Scandin the picture of the cover of the book and I will note, and I'm gonna use my mouse here a little bit so you can kind of see the bumped edges. These are good examples of bumped edges and shelf wear. And this little crinkle down here at the bottom, it was dropped from a great height. And I will tell you, on the right hand side, this browning, that's actually water damage. And when you opened up the inside, you could see the water damage. The water damage was dried correctly and there was no evidence of mold or mildew. It was just, it's got that definite water stain on the inside of the book and it kind of came through. On the bottom of the page, you'll see what is left of the copyright page. This is all there is on this particular book, which is almost 100 years old. Copyright 1915 by Harper and Brothers, printed in the United States of America, published March 1915. And then underneath that, it's got an F dash Q. Now, the other thing that is a little bit confusing on this is when you look at the title page on the right hand side of your screen, it says the publisher is Grosset and Dunlap, but on the copyright page, it says by Harper and Brothers. So we've got a little bit of a mystery here. And when you're looking at this and you've got a question, my suggestion is that the copyright page is going to overrule the title page. And that may not work all the time and you may have to look under both of the publishers online when you're trying to get a value. And I will tell you that when I input Johnny Appleseed and I use Grosset and Dunlap, I got zero hits. I actually had to use the Harper and Brothers. So once that sort of helped me guide it to the fact that the Harper and Brothers was the original publisher of this particular book, basically Grosset and Dunlap wrote the rights and republished this edition. Well, when I went to that, that I was wondering, what does F dash Q mean? And it's March 1915, the first edition, I got kind of excited. Well, I'm sad and sorry to say that when I went to that Quill and Brush website and I looked under Harper and Brothers, the F dash Q indicates the printing date is June of 1916. So that I actually sort of confused the case even more, but what it meant to me was that the book was, it's actually a later printing of the book and it's not the original Harper and Brothers, it's a reprint by Grosset and Dunlap. And so you can see, quickly see how confusing when you're trying to value a book how confusing this can be. And that I think, so that would be why I'm looking at, just so that'd be why the bottom of the title page there does have the published by arrangement with Harper and Brothers. So that's somehow the connection there, yeah. You really gotta track down the history of these things then, huh? Oh, you do, and it's hard to figure it. Well, who came first? Exactly. So in this instance, if I was to rate this book, not even looking at online, but just from those condition criteria, the water damage, the bumped corners, the fact that it does not have a dust jacket and there were books published without dust jackets. However, when we go online here, well, I'm actually gonna do it as part of my presentation, you will see that in the descriptions this was originally published with a dust jacket. So we're missing the dust jacket. I would just give the book itself a rating of fair condition. And if you're thinking yourself, yeah, but that's a decent looking book, it's got a little damage, but to a collector, they would rate this as fair. To somebody who is purchasing it to read it, they might call it good. It certainly isn't anything beyond good condition. And again, I think fair is actually a more accurate rating on this particular book. So this is the A-books and we will go out to the internet here in a moment, but when I type this information in and you'll notice all the criteria that you can actually add in, which is why I love this website, on the right-hand side, you can put in a first edition if maybe it's a stated first edition or maybe you think it's a first edition, you can add in if it's a signed edition, if it's got a dust jacket. Underneath that, you can put down the choices are hardcover or softcover or on-demand, of course, getting into our more modern age, but in most cases, I'm looking at hard covers and then you can change your results there. And this is what I started with. You notice that I tried putting in grosset first and 1915 and I'm gonna click and these were my results. I guess I apologize. I did use grosset and Dunlap and it did get a hit on it. I didn't think it did. It did get the hits with the grosset and Dunlap. Again, it's indicating that we've got a secondary publisher, but the thing to notice here is look at your potential costs on this and you could be selling this book for a 50 cents or a dollar at your book sale and you might be missing out on revenue. Now, with that said, as you start looking at this and you start going, does this match the book I have in front of me? Well, the first one has the book condition of good and then as you read through, it says comes with dust jacket if published with one. Dust jacket may have some tears and rubbing. Okay, that's a very peculiar thing to say. Comes with dust jacket if published with one. If I was a buyer, if I was a book collector, I would not buy from this seller. I find that very odd statement because they should know whether it has a dust jacket or not. The second one, you'll notice, definitely gives you, it's got a book condition of very good plus. Well, our book isn't that good and the dust jacket condition is good. First grosset edition. Well, our numbering from that Harper definitely was indicating that ours is probably not a first printing or a first edition and it talks about a handsome bound copy in green decorated cloth covers. Ours were gray, not green. So again, the green was probably the true first edition. The gray was probably a different printing and you'll notice that as you read through this light wear to spine ends and cornered, dust jacket is essentially complete with lots of edge wear and some small closed tears. Okay, again, it confirms the fact that there really was a dust jacket with this. So it makes me go, oh, while this book might be potentially valuable, it doesn't match. And again, if you'll notice in the upper left, we only had two hits on Abe books and it's really not a good match for us. So then I thought, I wonder if Abe Libris would have this book. So I went over there, put in the title and the author and the year. Again, 1915, 19, maybe that's what it was, 1916 came up with zero hits. And you'll notice that the results here range from $10 to $30 and of interest, number nine here on the $30 one, notice the description. It's a fair, well ours is fair. No dust jacket, well ours doesn't either, but it says ex library, but they want $30 for it, which I think they're kind of reaching there from that. But as I'm looking back down here on the $10 one, the condition is good, it has no dust jacket. And then I look at the $15 description, good in fair jacket. So it actually does have a dust jacket with it and it's ex library for $15. So as you're looking at these and you're comparing it to the book you have in front of you and we're thinking ours is fair, but it's better than an ex library copy, but it's got some other condition issues and it's minus a jacket. I think that when you look at all the conditions, when you're looking at $10 being the lowest, what we just saw, my estimated value of this book would be $8 and my asking price at the book sale is actually $4. And let me tell you a little bit about my rationale behind that. If we price this at $4, the reason I would price it at $4 is because I usually take my estimated value and decrease it by 50%. And the reason is because if you've got somebody who's new in collecting, they don't wanna invest a lot of money, they don't have a lot of money and they're gonna buy the books that aren't as pristine, they're not in the good to very good or fine condition, they're gonna buy a book that's fair or good condition. And the other reason is because we actually have quite a few secondary bookstore owners who come to our book sale and they wanna have some area to make a profit and a margin and so that book is more likely to sell if I put it at 50%. So I would actually have priced this book at $4 at our book sale to see if it sells. Does anybody have any question about the pricing or arriving at that estimated value? Not specifically about that, but we do have a question about does A-Books buy actual books or is it just a place to get value? A-Books is very much like the Amazon z-shops. They are individual booksellers that are selling online and bookstores that are selling online. So they don't buy books like a company. They are a reseller and they take their share just kind of like eBay would. So yes, I see, I'm just looking at the site now and I did all these links will be available at the show notes afterwards. There is a link to sell books but it talks about becoming a paying a monthly subscription fee, expose your inventory, yeah, for. It's really designed for bookstore owners or people who have extensive collections who want to sell them all. But dealers, yeah, not something like a library came across something and they'd wanna, yeah. No, however, I'm gonna talk in a moment here about Better World Books, which that kind of goes right in. What do we do if the book doesn't sell? Which all of us, we all have remainders after those book sales. So my specially priced books, you can certainly lower the asking price sometimes. You just didn't hit the right buyer during that book sale. You can keep it the same price but you can carry it over and resell it. We actually, we try not to do that because we have enough books coming in through weeding projects at the library and our donations that we don't like to carry over more than maybe 20 books. We really don't carry over more than one or two boxes. On the especially priced things, if we think we've just missed a buyer, especially if it's like a local history book, we may try lowering the price and trying it again at the next sale. You can certainly set up again a seller's account with eBay or A-Books. You can try and sell it yourself as the library or the friends of the library. Or you can utilize a service like Better World Books. And I wanna talk a little bit about Better World Books because I will say that we used to, by the end of our book sales, all of our popular authors and more sellable things, they're gone. What is left are lesser or unknown authors, books that are in really crappy condition, books, especially priced books that we overpriced perhaps. And so what we have decided to do is try and utilize a company such as Better World Books. And I was really skeptical about using them. But again, at the end of our book sales with these crappy books left, we were throwing them in the trash and so they were filling up landfills. And this was a great alternative for us because we don't have the space to carry them over and we hated throwing them out even though it was really funny to see some of our library patrons going dumpster diving behind the library trying to save the books. I have no idea what they did. Some people, I swear, lined their houses and used them as insulation, but who knows? But Better World has been a great friend and partner with us. And I will say that their criteria of books that they will accept does change. And that is something that you would need to check into if you did become one of their partner libraries. But how it works is about two or three weeks before our book sale, I order shipping boxes from Better Worlds. There's no charge for this. They send me anywhere from 25 to 200 flattened boxes. And after the sale, we just simply pack up the remainder books into the boxes and tape them shut. I go to the Better Worlds website and print off prepaid UPS shipping labels and tape them on the boxes. UPS comes, picks up all the boxes, ships them off. That is all done at the expense of Better World Books. And then as our donated books to Better Worlds sells, the friends of the library will receive a check back once the amount that is sold is over $50. Typically, we get $55 to $95 every other month or quarterly. That's about what we're getting in our profits. I'm going to try going out to Better World Books at this time. And I'd like to show you just a short two-minute video. And we'll see if we can get it to play with the audio. So here we go, Krista. Let me know if it doesn't play and we'll see what happens. Actually, we can just barely hear it. Can you trim the volume at all on it? Yeah, trim the volume all the way up, yeah. We've raised millions of dollars and done millions of books. We are a for-profit social enterprise. Just being a business is not good enough. Doing good is built into our business model. We actually give an ownership share through a non-profit literacy program. So when we do well, they do well. And as an employee, it's great to work for a company that shares my values. But also, as a bookstore, we want to live up to customers' values. And the more people that share and act on these values, the bigger impact we all have together. Let's change the world together. So that's just a little clip on them. Yeah, and that video, if anyone's looking, is actually on the Better World website, too, under their info so you can watch it there. Because we were able to hear it was just a little low. But I was able to hear everything once you turned it up. OK, great. It does tell more about it. They will tell you that one of the things that we have really gotten excited about is the fact that they will take library discards. They want ex-library books. And that's just fantastic for us looking for a place. Because one of the things that when you look at your discards and what do you do with them, one of the options is recycling. The problem with recycling is you have to remove the outer cover and cut off the glue or spine of the book. And all you can do is recycle the paper. Or if you can recycle the rest of it, it's got to be done separately. And so we don't have the labor to do that. And Better World, it's just great. After the book sale, we box them up. UPS comes and it takes them away. Now with that said, if there's any school libraries out there I just found out last week, sad to say they are not taking school library discards anymore. I don't know why, but they do change their parameters. One of the things that we got concerned about last fall was they said they were not going to take library discards. And I said, but that's what you're building. That's what your old business is based on. So I called them up and we were so frustrated. And they said, no, what we meant was we don't want books where people have tried to remove the barcodes, ripped out the pockets out of the books. Basically, you're damaging the book. And then that's when they don't want it. They don't want books that are falling apart. The other book thing that they've put in there is they don't want books that are series that came out of a magazine and periodicals like your Time Life books. They have too many in their inventory. And so they didn't want those. And those are some beautiful sets. And unfortunately, at that particular time, they weren't taking them. And you've got your choices. Again, you can try and resell them, pitch them. You can try and find an alternative use for them. So that is one of the trade-offs with working with them. And of course, readers, I just condensed, we don't even take those in our library. We won't even accept those. We'll put them on our free giveaway area, but we will not take those into our booksell because they just don't sell. So I understand that that is something that if you do contact better world books and want to be part of them, you just need to work with them. And if they say, well, I'm sorry, we're not taking any new libraries at this point in time, check back in six months because they do change and develop their policies. It's again, they are a for-profit business. And they were very upfront about that. But we did love the fact that they had such a green mission and such a philanthropic mission and literacy mission as part of their business model. So they've been great for us. We've really enjoyed working with them. We do a question about them. Do you know if, oh, well, I'll just, anyway, he went about medical series because you said not series books. Clinks of North America, they have a series. It's hardcover books. They're, to the library, they're considered a periodical because they come out regularly, but it's actually books. But she said she can ask them directly, I suppose, if you're not sure. You've never done anything medical. Is it based off of a magazine? No. Periodical? Then I would say, yes, they would take it. Yeah, they just once in this was a magazine and now became a book type thing. Yeah. Correct. And so one of the things we had was we had this gorgeous childcraft encyclopedia, which has these gorgeous nursery rhymes and illustrations. But it's based on the magazine Childcraft. And the series was done in, like, 1953 or something. And so what I and some other people of our friends group have decided to do is we need to check and make sure it's not against copyright. But what we want to do is cut the pages out of the book and frame them like somebody might use them in a nursery because the illustrations are so beautiful. So we're trying to find other uses for them other than getting rid of them. On here, I just want to go to A Books for just a moment. This is their main web page. And again, you can certainly purchase from them. But one of the more interesting things, Better World Books is a seller. They're a bookseller on here, which I find really interesting. So if you happen to buy and they happen to be the seller, you know that you're probably helping a library or college or other nonprofit somewhere. But in the upper left-hand corner is the advanced search. And when I'm going through my box of books, this is my friend. I love this. This is just the ability to be able to put in keywords. So if you did have the publisher, grosset keyword, you could add the word keyword Harper if you've got limited edition or a special illustrator. It's a special edition. Or I've typed in the words boxed set if it's something more modern. Like we had the Laura Ingle Wilder series that came in a boxed set. Things like that to try and get your value on some of those things. And again, first edition signed, best jacket, all of that is just very, very helpful when you're trying to get a value on a book. eBay does have its own section of books, but it's more tricky to navigate. And I personally am not familiar with it. If you've got a staff member or a board member or somebody who loves to sell on eBay, taking your books that you might think have more value is certainly another way to try and get rid of them as well. Here is a Libras. And again, to me, their search is just not as in depth. And again, it's set up more for a purchaser. But if you're looking for options, especially if you can't find anything on A-Books, it's a great option. One more thing about A-Books, I will say, we had individual time life magazines that have been given to us. And most of the time, magazines, they don't even have any value. However, you'll get ones that might be like when JFK died. And by the way, life actually did do a reprint of the original. So it is kind of tricky. But again, you can use this site for specialty magazines to help you price them as well. Certain editions, depending on the subject matter or individual, might have additional value as well. So I wish you luck in all your endeavors to try and make some more money off of your book sales. And if there's any way that I can possibly help, I would be happy to help you value your items. OK, great. Thanks so much, Cecilia. We do have a couple of questions that had come in. Someone actually has a suggestion themselves. They've started using something called thriftbooks.com. They provide the same kind of services, Better World, but you get your own landing page, and they will determine the value for rare books. We just started using them, and we'll get 50% to 55% back on the sold books. That's awesome. Thank you for that information. thriftbooks.com, I'll add that to the links for the show afterwards so people can get to it. And then a question about what about using Amazon to check value and sell books? Amazon is definitely a very helpful place. The trick is trying to find value when you've got an author's signature. Because I think of Amazon as more current, you're not going to find the things pre-1970 really, not nearly as often. I had more success with AID books than I did Amazon. They just didn't have the inventory on the old books. And it's hard to make sure that you're matching the exact same addition when you're trying to price. And I would be like, oh, my gosh, this is worth $28. Well, then I'd look, oh, it's a softback book. Well, no, I've got a hardback in front of me. So it just wasn't a good match for me. But if you had hardback books that are more current, especially ones maybe that were published in the last five years that might have an author's signature, but again, to try and find that, unless they've enhanced their search engine and they may have, I don't usually use them. But definitely, if you're having trouble finding it at all, give them a try. Sure, yeah. It's another resource, definitely. We do have someone here who wants to use their microphone. Michael, you're unmuted. Hello. Hi. So just a question and a comment and a suggestion. I want to reiterate, as a collector and a seller for many years myself, the concept of additions and printings is a fine line and something you do need to do some research on. And especially if you're listing something online and you're not sure, don't make a claim that you're not sure of because a buyer can get really upset over that. With the extra books after a sale, I used to run a bookstore for a friend's group. And we had contacts with what we called, for lack of a better term, designers. And they would buy a lot of our extra books, especially without dust jackets, to line the shelves and houses they were selling and things like that. There are people who will just put up books for more design purposes. They don't care what's actually in the book. And that was a great way to sell off some of our excess inventory also. Like staging a house for sale. And then, Cecilia, if you could. Like staging a house for sale? Yes, yeah, exactly. And under your list of issues to mention in a book, you didn't mention book club additions. I was just wondering if you could talk about that briefly. My groan, as I groan, and as a book collector, you know why book collectors do not want book club additions. And you'll find that in that keyword option under A book, I would definitely put, if you have a book club addition, because, again, a collector will steer clear of those. And as Michael said, the condition and addition are just crucial. And I will say, I am not an appraiser. I made that disclaimer when I did this at NLA, and I didn't do it at the start of this, and I should. But the more you work with them, the more you get to understand it. And if you yourself are interested in the books, you'll understand why someone would pay hundreds of dollars versus a couple dollars on a particular book. Yeah, book club additions. And the other thing that you can look for, they call them clipped additions. Book collectors do not want a clipped addition. And what that means is if you look on the dust jacket, and it has a corner that's been clipped, or part of the cover on a softback has been torn off, basically it's indicating that a bookstore had to get rid of the book by the publisher. The publisher said, we are dumping all our copies. And the bookstore owner felt that it had some value of what's inside it, and they have to damage the book in some way. And again, a book collector is not going to want it. But for somebody looking for a reading copy, I would still sell them at your book sale. But that is another warning flag. But accurately describing what you're selling is crucial. And you need to look at it with the eyes that a collector would use. Be very critical. Yes, very critical. And things that you're like, well, this is a decent book. Well, you need to be looking for scuff marks on a shiny cover. You need to take the dust jacket off the book. And one of the things that I've learned is that when you are looking at the book, to be very gentle in how many times, don't lay it open, don't open the entire book unless you have a pillow to prop it on. Because the more you stretch out that spine, the more likely you're going to have of breaking the spine or damaging it. And so, especially in an old book, you need to really be delicate with them. Most of our types of books that we're getting in aren't that delicate, except the one I got from 1753. I do not open that unless I have a pillow with me. But most of our ones that are 100 years or less old, just be very gentle in opening them up to keep them as clean and pristine. And your hands and your workstation should all be clean as well when you're looking at them. OK, great. Thanks. If anybody has any other questions that I see right now, if you have any, please type them in. We'll wrap this up in just a few minutes. I was just curious, from the beginning, I was just kind of popped in my head. You're talking about these books that are very valuable in special editions and first editions. Is it really that common that people just donate these kind of things to the library and don't even know what they have, like an individual? Yeah. OK. Yes. And more than likely, what we've basically, we're getting an estate. And so, the people, they're like, we don't want to deal with these heavy books. And they're dumping boxes and boxes and boxes. And that's what happened. The one where I got the 1902 First American Printing of Hound of the Baskervilles, there was a first edition Bambi. There was like six other first editions that we caught and sort of freaked out going, oh my lord, these are probably worth some money. And since that time, we've had many more large estate donations. Or after auctions, nobody wants the books. What happens is the booksellers will go through and cherry pick the Westerns or the small publishers. And then they dump the rest. And usually, there'll be some good stuff in there still. But we've been pleasantly surprised. You don't find it in the modern stuff, things that have been published in the last 50 years. But you'll find, you get these donations of old books with dust jackets, and they're great. So more often than you think. Yeah. Nice. All right. OK. Then I think we will, we're a little after 11 AM central time here. I think we'll wrap it up for today. Thank you very much, Cecilia. That was very interesting. I did not attend your session at NLA. I was probably doing some other ones. But as usual, when you go to conferences, all sorts of different sessions, you don't get to. So this is great. We just have comments saying, great webinar. Thank you very much. This is awesome. Oh, someone is in the midst of their sort of annual, annual sale right now. And she has some ideas for leftovers. So definitely it would be helpful. OK. So thank you very much, everyone, for attending. Thank you, Cecilia, for being with us this morning. Thank you. We are going to wrap it up for today. I'm going to pull back Presenter Control now to my computer. There we go. And as I said, I've captured all of the links that were mentioned. You can see some of them here on our delicious account. They'll be added to the recording afterwards when we post that on our website. So that will wrap it up for today's Encompass Live. I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is, oh, the recordings go right here. I'll just show you archived Encompass Live sessions down here below our list of upcoming shows. All of our shows are posted here. You get the recording on our YouTube channel, presentation usually on our slide share, and links to our delicious altogether will be available after the show. And that'll be up later today sometime most likely. I'll let you all know when it's available. Hope you join us next week when our topic is discount shopping with NLC. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we do have some discount arrangements for certain, for books, conferences, supplies, all sorts of different things. So Susan Nisley, who is our online services librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, will be with us next week to talk about all the great things you can save money on if you are a Nebraska library here in the state of Nebraska. Also Encompass Live, so please do join us for that in any of our other upcoming shows. Also Encompass Live is on Facebook, so if you are a Facebook user, please do go ahead and like us over there to get notifications of when the recording is available. Here I also remind every morning when the new show is ready to start so people can log in on the fly. So if you are big on Facebook, please do go ahead and like us there. Other than that, that will wrap it up for today's show. Thank you very much, and we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.