Cookbooks are the third most popular category among new books and a good one to start with. People often raid their parents' and grandparents' collections to find good used cookbooks.
To find and buy old books, first check your local library for its "Friends of the Library" book sales. They have annual sales of donated books and many antique dealers line up for these. Of course it helps to know your prices, so to begin with you might stick to a particular category, for example cookbooks. You can usually get books for 25 cents to a dollar and on the last day they have a bag sale.
Sometimes you can get books free at the end of the sale. But the best time to go is the night before the sale when they let the members of the "Friends" buy cheap, in advance of the sale. Membership usually runs about $10 a year and you can easily make your money back with your first sale. It's a good cause besides.
You want to look for books that you've done your research on, of course, but also look for any book from the pre 1900s in fair condition. They will usually get you at least ten times what you paid for it.
Also look at flea markets, garage sales, estate sales and auctions. I found a signed copy of a rare, signed Julia Child cookbook with dust jacket intact in fine condition at an estate sale. It was also signed by her husband Paul Child, the illustrator. The book was appraised at $500.
The house was in an area of little houses with older folks. Don't judge a book by its cover or a house by its appearance I guess is the lesson here! You never know what you'll find. I also found some other great cookbooks and books there.
To research the value I would avoid the usual rare book price guides. Many of these are outdated. The actual price is today's price.
To find out what the books should sell for, go to your favorite search engine and type in the title. You should be able to find sites that are selling the same title and give you a broad range to choose from. Finding 'sold' book prices are much better.
One you've established a price, the fastest way to sell these books is to sell them online at your own website or get a free one from any of the sites who are offering this service.
I'd definitely add photos of the books. They should be of high quality. Take close up shots of the title page and a sample recipe page. Take shots from different angles. Pick about six of your best shots.
If you're in hurry, price them lower than the other books. If you aren't in a hurry price them at the high end of the range. Then when the others are sold your price will be a bargain. Antique books will generally rise in price as they become rare.
Of course there are many other ways to sell your old books. eBay is another of course. And there are lots of ways to sell them offline too. Be open to different venues.
Finding and selling old, rare, vintage or antique books or cookbooks is great fun, with very little upfront costs. With these tips and this information, it should help you know how to start buying and selling used books and cookbooks, have a nice side home-based business, a cultural experience, and lots of fun too.
Old books contain an absolute wealth of information that is just as important today as it ever was, no matter how long ago the books were written. For example there are now a great many sites on the internet devoting themselves to scanning and digitising old books, in order to make them available for you and me to download to modern computers.
Just do a search and you will come up with pages upon pages of sites giving you lists of historic books to download either at a charge or for free to use as you require. One of the major download sites is Project Gutenberg, which has a massive database of free to use public domain material for you to read online, or download to your own computers entirely at your leisure. Obviously another site and the major player in the game is Google, with their google.com books site.
But why are these ancient books so important and in such great demand you might well ask? Answer. The information you can glean from old books is quite usually relevant to modern times, with maybe just a few minor differences.
For instance, if you take as an example a previously printed book on keeping fit and read it through from start to finish, you will soon realise that with the exception of modern gym equipment for your use, very little else has changed about how to keep fit in general, since the days of Eugen Sandow and his popular book "Strength and How to Obtain it" In fact if we were to use this example and enlarge upon it even further, it soon becomes obvious that there are millions of books in circulation on the subject... and all making money out of the keep fit market for their publishers no matter how large or small.
Now many of these modern books will be reprints and exact copies or very similar to the original version. How can this be so? The answer is that they are all now public domain material. In other words the copyright on them has expired and is available for use by you, me or anyone else in any way we so desire.
So you will see new works being sold all over the world, even though they may just be new rehashes of old books, all making a fantastic income for the individual or publisher that has put a little thought time and effort into using an historic book to make money.
Turning old books into making money is easy as ABC. This process is so simple that it can be carried out by anyone, without the use of any special equipment. You can either rewrite or type your material and then take it to a local print shop for copying and binding.
Better still if you own a computer (and if you are reading this I'll assume you do) then you can use your printer/ scanner- which are very cheap to obtain these days, in order to scan the pages into a word file or notepad. Then edit as you like, even change the title if you wish and add your name as the author, so that possible competitors cannot see exactly where your original work came from. Publish your new book as a printed item, or in digital format for instant download as a PDF file, or burn your book onto a CD.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of different subjects to choose your public domain material from in order to research your own niche market. It is estimated that there are over 85 million ancient books in the Public Domain.
You can get many further examples for Niche product creation by doing a keyword research on one of the many available Internet sites, some of the best ones such as wordtracker being free for your use. You now have no reason for not researching your own niche market, which you can then use to build a product and let old printed books make money for you.
Both Helen Hecker & Dave Robus are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.