Dispelling 5 common myths about textbooks
"Do older editions sell?" is asking the wrong question.
Demand has nothing to do with the edition. Literally nothing.
You can determine nothing about a book's demand by knowing how many newer editions there are.
Let's just say there's a book titled "Introduction of Biology." They're on the 15th edition, and you're looking at the 11th edition. There's nothing about that information that you have in front of you, that should in any way indicate what the demand of the 11th edition is.
The edition is a totally irrelevant data point when it comes to assessing a book's demand. Tons of very old textbooks sell consistently.
There's only one thing that matters when it comes to addressing a book's demand. It's not the edition, it's not the year the book was printed. Literally everything is irrelevant, except for one thing. Average sales rank. Sales rank history is truly the only measure of a book's demand.
They do care a little bit but they don't care as much as normal book buyers. Students care a lot less about textbook condition than consumers of other books care about the condition for their purchases.
They're only buying your textbook because the professor is making them. Can you picture a 19-year old pulling the textbook out of the envelope and going, "Hold on a second here. This has a ding in the corner, I'm going to leave bad feedback"? You can get away with being a little more lax with your grading standards when it comes to textbooks.
Don't compare books to to the same book in another format or on another site. Kindle is its own market. Rentals are a separate market. Ebay is different buyer and different market.
Price your textbooks as though your customer was only looking at that column on that page. That's the way to price textbooks.
This is the biggest myth of all. This myth only thrives among people who have never actually sold textbooks.
Sales do spike in August and January. But it does not mean that textbooks don't sell the rest of the year.
Good news is, you don't have to wonder. Keepa provides historical data (displayed right inside Zen Arbitrage) so you can see exactly what the demand for a book is, year-round.
Again, the sales rank history does not lie. Textbooks sell all year-round.
The forces that make online book arbitrage work apply to any book, period. It does happen to work best for textbooks, but this business model will work for any book that has a steady demand that also has a big gap between the cheapest price and the cheapest FBA price.
- Peter Valley