What is the Best Way to Process Non-ISBN Books?

Posted by Adam on June 29th, 2010

Category Uncategorized

I wanted to take this time to reach out to my readers to get some feedback on a piece of my personal business.  If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I not only blog about selling books online I also do it every day.  I try to focus on general topics explaining concepts and giving great advice but I’m in need of some help and couldn’t think of anyone better than my readers so here goes!

I typically receive around 150,000 books every year in huge gaylord boxes that hold anywhere from 1,000 – 1,500/piece.  I always buy in large quantities and delivery comes every so often throughout the year.  I’m also cramped on space as I only have (2) 2-car garages to hold all of this these incoming books!  Because of the lack of space and also labor (it’s typically me and/or a family member) I’m forced to speed through books as quickly as possible to consistently make room for more books.

I’m beginning to loseWeight Exercise this battle with space and was curious if anyone else was in my position regarding how they sort through books that do not have a barcode or ISBN.  Currently, when processing books, they get sorted into a few different gaylords; recyclables, books sold offline, manual lookup, FBA or local fulfillment.  Luckily, I’ve been lucky with selling to used bookstores and flea markets and spending time to recycle the nasty books, but the problem I’m currently running into is with my manual lookup gaylords.  They are getting out of hand!  Due to the time it takes to properly look them up and match them with an an Amazon ASIN, I don’t look them up when in the first phase of sorting.  All of these books get checked and then tossed into a gaylord box for later processing.

I’ve been doing this for about 6 months now but it’s now catching up to me!  I currently have around 10,000 books that do not have an ISBN taking up a lot of space plus who knows what kind of value these books hold!  I need to get through them and quick!  However, due to the consistent stream of books coming in, I simply can’t take time to process these.  Do you see my dilemma?  I refuse to sell them for nothing because I’ve found hundreds of $50+ books in these gaylords but they just make it so hard to squeeze that value out of them! icon smile What is the Best Way to Process Non ISBN Books?

My question is, if anyone else is my situation that has a business model of buying books in bulk and has this problem, what do you do?  Do you just force yourself or your employees to begin processing these kind of books or sell them in bulk just to be rid of them?  I’m in dire need of some suggestions as I’m currently bursting at the seams with more gaylords coming in but an ever-increasing amount of these non-ISBN books.

If you get a minute, please leave your feedback and ideas on what you think I need to do to improve my process and feel free to ask any questions yourself.  I would greatly appreciate it!

If you liked this post "Like" it via Facebook with the button above. Also, I love getting comments and discussing these issues with readers. Feel free to leave a comment below.

  • MZ Warehouse

    It sounds to me like you need to put some pure dollars and cents behind this problem. Dedicate one workday (however many hours that is for you) and plow through as many as you can. Then analyze how many books per hour and the average return you get from them. Then you can make an informed decision on whether the few $50 books are worth the time it takes to look them all up manually and how often you should dedicate your time to the task.

  • http://twitter.com/SuzsSpace Suzie Eisfelder

    You could try a programme called Collectorz. You type in the names of the books and it will do a big search for you. It won't find every single book and it won't give you all the information you need but it will save some typing and then export everything to an Excel spreadsheet. You can do multiple searchs at one time.

  • Steve

    Great post, Adam. I'm about where you are. I bought a 10k+ book collection of 80%+ non-ISBN books. So, I'm forced to trudge through them now if I want them sold. I like Suzie's suggestion below – I've reviewed the collectorz website and the tool looks pretty cool.

    As for advice, I'd suggest setting a timeline goal to have all 10k books processed. Then divide that goal by, say, 5 days per week times 'X' weeks. Figure out what you can handle each day and just jump in. Perhaps the incentive for getting multiples of these $50+ books listed and sold will be you could reward yourself with a new part-time high school bibliophile to speed the process along.

  • adbertram

    I'll have to look into that Thank you.

  • Schedlbl731

    Hmm…well, me and my mom have been bookselling for three months now and are still pretty small time, but we stumbled upon something that works pretty good for us. I'm a new graduate and wasn't able to afford the scanner and PDA, so I was looking into other options for scanning. I ended up buying a droid. I use the amazon app to scan books at rummage sales, it's still a tad slower but it works great on those books that don't have ISBNs because you can take a picture of the book and use that instead of typing out the ISBN. Beware that this app doesn't give you the book's rank, however you can see every listing if you want to. Not sure if this tool would help when you have thousands of books to process, but I'm still convinced it's faster than finding and typing in the ISBN in a lot of cases.

  • adbertram

    That might work but in order to list the book I need the ASIN and I
    don't think it provides that.

  • adbertram

    I think you are right on the money here. I'm going to try this.

  • thebrokedown

    Other than sending all of them to me, I have no suggestions :)

  • Chris Green

    Good advice here already. I agree that sometimes by the time it takes to find the good books, it just isn't worth it. I'd post a craigslist ad or network with the other sellers in your area that you run into and try to find someone trustworthy who has more of an eye for this type of thing. Let them do the work and split the profits.

  • Rezolutionz

    There are many handheld services that will allow you to look up a pre-ISBN item via title or LCCN. They are databse versions which are faster and also those which require wifi, cellphone lookup is IMO currently not fast enough or streamlined enough on any platform to be used in a real situation. In a pinch yeah… but not for anything like multiple Gaylords of books when you look outside and can see an obviously beautiful day wasting away..

  • Hope this helps

    Perhaps you could use an OCR pen scanner. I did a quick search and came up with one that cost about $125.

    C-Pen Mobile Handheld OCR Scanner Pen supports 238 Languages

    http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Handheld-Scanner-s…

  • adbertram

    I've thought about that before but have found that the accuracy isn't
    great alot of times. I was afraid that I'd spend too much time
    correcting errors.

  • Brandon

    Can you describe the process of how you look these up manually? Could you take a photo of each book then have somebody online try to find the relevant information?

  • adbertram

    I've also thought of that idea and am close to trying it out. The only
    downside to that is I will need to keep them in order because when I
    give them books 1-500 they'll say I can list books 1,45,56,89,101,
    etc. To find those I will need to organize for the time it takes me to
    scan then to when they notify me which ones to list.

  • Brandon

    I was thinking that with a little bit of programming you could post stuff like that to Amazon Mechanical Turk and pay people a few cents for finding relevant information on each book. I'm guessing that they would have to look at a photo to determine the Title, Author, publisher, or something and then identify an ISBN or ASIN for the book.

    True that you would then have to go through the ones that they identified and then pull out the books that you wanted to do something with. Keeping them in order is probably a simple enough way to do that.

  • adbertram

    That's not a bad idea!

  • permacrisis

    Could you read the titles aloud into Dragon Naturally Speaking or IBM's ViaVoice at the time the books are being loaded? Then dump that TXT file into a search program later?

  • adbertram

    I like your thinking!

  • adbertram

    I like your thinking!

  • permacrisis

    Hilary DePiano’s “Whineseller” blog talks about just this piece of functionality in her latest post, and compares the FREE voice-to-text provided in Windows 7 with other, premium software: http://ow.ly/2VQbK …hope this helps.

  • Cas

    Sell them on Ebay. No ASIN required