Selling your textbooks
By Amy Crane • Bankrate.com

The new and used textbook market is extremely lucrative for publishers, which is the major reason why so many college students get so little when they sell their used textbooks.

"I walked away from school very bitter about the exploitation publishers and bookstores subject students to," says Mari Pillar, a 2004 graduate of the University of Houston. In Pillar's junior year, she sold $250 worth of textbooks back to an alternative off-campus bookstore and received $33.

Pillar and other former students agree that one way to make more money off used textbooks is to form relationships with students in your major and sell directly to those students who need them.

You can also sell your books online through vendors such as eBay, Amazon and eCampus. Best Book Buys provides a list of vendors that buy used textbooks along with their policies.

If you're interested in selling a book to an online retailer, enter the ISBN number of the book you want to sell at its Web site and it'll quote you a price. Some of these vendors provide pre-paid postage mailing labels for you to ship the book to them at no cost.

If you want more, you can register on such sites as eBay or Amazon and sell the book yourself to an interested buyer, which may take longer than selling the book to a major vendor.

See also: Dealing with the high cost of texbooks