Did you know that you can sell your own used books through Amazon, the world’s dominant Internet-based bookstore? You can also sell books that you find at yard sales and from thrift shops.

Well, it’s likely that is not news to you, especially if you’ve been looking into various methods to make money online. Amazon.com’s sellers program is a well-known place for people to list and sell their used books.

What might be news to you is that it is possible to make a decent side income or even, with work, a considerable first income by becoming an Amazon-affiliated bookseller.

Now that might be frankly difficult to believe if you got caught, as I did, in the great oversupply problem that struck Amazon’s used-book sellers a while back.

It’s so easy to become an Amazon bookseller that hundreds and then thousands of people started doing it. The result was to drive down prices so far that some books were being sold for pennies – hardly worth the time and expense of packaging and mailing them to customers.

Yet, as I only recently learned myself, it’s still possible to find books that you can buy for 25 cents, 50 cents or at most a dollar, and then to resell them (through Amazon) for $10 or $30 or occasionally a hundred bucks or more.

What makes it possible is getting hold of a handheld PDA, outfitting it with a barcode reader, and installing Amazon’s entire database onto it. Then, simply carry your PDA/barcode device along with you on your book hunts. You can use it to check the current fetching prices of the books you find, and then only grab those that you can see will fetch a good price when you list them on Amazon.

Using a PDA with Amazon’s data right at your fingertips is the smart way to run a used-book selling business. The greatest benefit is that this will keep you from wasting your energy (and funds) acquiring books that no one wants.

There’s a good ebook available on how to make money today selling used books through Amazon, using the PDA secret. You can read a detailed, independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go straight to the book’s web site to learn more.

There are quite a few other ways to sell books online. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined on this special Squidoo page.

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