When I started my online bookselling business almost five years ago, buying books for my inventory was hit and miss. The first couple hundred books were for the most part expensive firewood . Then, I put the Internet to work for me and started looking book values up before I would buy them. At the time, the only way to do this was to call my wife (at home) from my cell phone and tell her the ISBN to look up on the Amazon.com website.

This was awkward and slow, but did allow me to buy more books with a resale vale high enough to make a good profit. I know the stores I was shopping in must have thought I was a bit strange pulling books off the shelves and reading the ISBN's to someone on the receiving end of my phone call, but it did beat buying more firewood.

Then along came the wireless lookup services that let you type an ISBN into your web enabled cell phone and get the latest online prices for that title. Personally, I really like doing this; it is a lot like playing slot machines except that I don't lose. I just type the ISBN number into my phone and wait for the numbers to come up on the screen to see if I have a winner. Of course, some winners sell a lot faster than others, but now, it is rare that I buy firewood and I can usually gauge how long a book will take to sell by the Amazon sales rank that is also provided by the lookup service.

There are very few times that I will buy a book without first looking it up and these can be put in two categories.

1) When I spot a book that I know I have sold before and made a good profit on.

2) When I attend a large library book sale and the prices are low enough that I just buy everything that I think has potential. I always end up with some firewood from these sales, but I have enough experience at online bookselling now that the winners I pick far outweigh the losers.

If you are planning to get into online bookselling and have not already done so, I strongly encourage you to research the wireless lookup services and subscribe to one that suits you. If you go out and blindly buy your inventory, you are likely to stock your bookshelves with firewood.

Many new online booksellers tend to think that if a book is old, or a classic, it would be a good book to sell. The truth is that these types of books are in demand, but the supply tends to be much greater than the demand, and many can be bought online for a penny or two.

My own parents are prolific readers of all kinds of modern publications, e.g., novels, suspense, mystery, and even drama. Every year they buy me a new book for my birthday and/or Christmas. Last year they bought me a new and very popular book at their local bookstore. I didn't want to sound ungrateful, but I hated seeing them spending $29.99 plus tax for a book they could have bought online for $0.15 plus $3.49 for shipping. Since my mom is very active on the Internet, I told her where to look for books and they now buy all their books online.

While this little side story about my parents does not have a lot to do with wireless lookup services, it does demonstrate that even the books you might think would be good online sellers because they are still in the front window displays of the local bookstores are not always profitable online sellers. There is no direct correlation between brick and mortar store prices and online selling prices. If you are going to sell online, the brick and mortar store prices are irrelevant, you need to know the online price and demand.

To further emphasize the irrelevance, about 70% of my online inventory comes from the clearance shelves of a brick and mortar bookstore. They have no demand for these books and cannot sell them, so they put them on their clearance shelves and I buy them for about $0.90. I have bought dozens of books from these clearance shelves and sold them for $50+ in the last couple months alone. Several others have sold for $150+.

The point is, as an online bookseller you need to know the online value and demand for a book BEFORE you buy it and there are several lookup services available to you for $5.00 to $30.00 per month. Any one of which will pay for itself in the first hour of book scouting that you use it.