Want a home-based business selling books online? Books are an outstanding ware to sell online because they can be bought quite cheaply and re-sold for a reasonable profit. Current college books are particularly profitable. Many book resellers specialize only in current college books. There are many college textbook buyback sites on-line, so college text books are not as easy to come by as they used to be.

With the development of the PDA which was adapted for use by book dealers as a barcode scanner, the amount of people buying and selling books on the online has really increased a lot. Selling books on on the Internet is pretty easy. The difficult part is sourcing the books in the first place. There are some obvious places: The local Goodwill, Salvation Army, and other local thrift stores. There are flea markets, estate sales and garage sales each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Garage sales can be quite profitable and are usually a lot of fun but you can burn a lot of gas and spend a lot of time traveling from garage sale to garage sale. For this reason the neighborhood garage sales are far better, where lots of people have their garage sales at the same time.

Books are, at garage sales often but not always reasonably inexpensive. With garage sales the early bird catches the worm. If you can get a list of local garage sales a few days before then plan your route to minimize your travel time and to avoid doubling back on yourself. When you do this you will usually find extra garage sales not on your list. These are a bonus.

Estate sales can be profitable but some are run by companies that specialize in conducting estate sales. What these firms frequently do is move a lot of items into the house from their own inventory and remove a lot of the valuable stuff for resale elsewhere. Probably on eBay. After you have attended a number of estate sales you will easily be able to spot the difference between a real estate sale and a staged, commercial estate sale. Moving sales are usually much better than estate sales because the moving sales are not usually staged.

Flea marketing can be especially challenging. Because often the other sellers have the same idea as you and are always on the lookout to increase their inventory. A lot of the market traders also sell on the online. Quite a lot of the best deals at the flea market are quite frequently all bought as soon as the flea market opens.

Library sales are a fine place to acquire used books and media. Competition however can be very stiff with other people lining up for many hours before the sale. Another consideration with library sales is that frequently one or two of the volunteers at the library are in fact book dealers, volunteering merely to get the first crack at the books. When the other dealers realize this they usually boycott the sale in future. The friends of the Library then scramble to purge their organization of any book dealers.

I wish you the very best of luck and a lot of success book hunting.