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Blue Rocket buying your books at BookPeople
Whether for sentimental reasons or to impress a date, many people keep every book they buy. (OK, I am sure some people simply like to re-read them, as well.) But for those who like to fight clutter or who look for an extra buck or two while recycling knowledge (or those who have forsaken dating and/or sentimentality), selling books has always been a decent option. Those looking to sell their books now have a new avenue.
In conjunction with Blue Rocket Books, last month indie titan BookPeople joined the book-buying fray. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m., you can take your used books to BookPeople and sell them to Blue Rocket Books … if they want what you have.
The collaboration with BookPeople is new, but Blue Rocket has been around for over a year. While it is great to have another place to sell books, arguably the coolest part of this new program is the online component. You can go to Blue Rocket’s website and enter the ISBN number of the book you want to sell, and they will tell you how much they will give you for it. (No more wandering around looking at magazines waiting for someone to call your name over a PA system.) If you agree to the price, you simply ship your book to Blue Rocket — they pay for shipping — and sit back and wait for the Brinks truck to back up to your house.
Now, before you get excited thinking that you’re gonna dump your entire Hardy Boys catalog on Blue Rocket, you should check their site. In an attempt to test how the site operates, I tried to see what they would give me for popular books by Dave Eggers, David McCullough, David Halberstam and Jonathan Franzen. Blue Rocket wasn’t biting. So either my choices were too pedestrian (and therefore not desirable) or too boring (and therefore not desirable). However, after searching some more, I discovered that you can get $3.08 and for Alexander Zaitchik’s “Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.” You must sell $10 worth of books in order to participate online; however, there is no minimum when you sell at BookPeople, where you can actually get five percent more on your sale if you take your payout in store credit.
I spoke with Blue Rocket co-owner Karen Dudzinski earlier this week by phone, and she gave me a little background on the company. Originally a textbook company, Dudzinski and her business partner realized Blue Rocket could be more successful and have a greater local presence by purchasing all sorts of books in addition to textbooks. While slightly used textbooks still offer one of the best possibility for a sale, Dudzinksi says Blue Rocket also looks for hardback non-fiction books. As for my searches, paperbacks and best sellers are not real hot items. Or, as Dudzinksi said, “We only buy books that have value on the market.” Well, yea, there’s that. Blue Rocket also offers books for purchase and aggregates other sellers from around the Web.
In addition to their selling and purchasing ways, Blue Rocket also seems to do an amazing amount of philanthropy, donating books and money to a variety of endeavors, including Inside Books Project, Project Schoolhouse, Solar Electric Light Fund, Reading Is Fundamental and the Austin Public Library’s Recycled Reads program.
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