Guest post by James Cecil, Candlelight Books LLC.  I love these personal story posts.  Please contact me if you’d like to write about your personal experiences with selling online.  As a reminder, I always pay $10/post for 500 words or more upon approval. – Adam

Today, April 16th, 2011, was my first actual Friends of the Library book scouting adventure. Prior to getting ready for this venture to a library book sale I visited scoutpal.com and read everything about the service on its website there. I also read what other book sellers have said about it from reading their postings from the sellyourbooksonline.com blogs and forum postings topic “Third Party Tools” subtopic “Best Scout Service”.  Yes, I did check out the other book scouting software as well however, ScoutPal was the only one that worked with the Tracfone LG cell phone.

Before I began, I visited the ScoutPal website and checked out the information there about the service.  What I liked about ScoutPal is that they offered a week’s free service trial as well as easy to follow instructions on how to set up your phone to use with ScoutPal. After I got everything set up on my phone I took a couple of books from my inventory and ran them through the service. I also visited another website and that website was BookThink.com. BookThink.com has a ScoutPal guide for new users written by Craig Stark dated February 14th, 2005. This article contains information on what not to do with ScoutPal, how to practice with ScoutPal first, formatting your ScoutPal information, and how to interpret the data you get back from a book that you just researched.

Having read Mr. Stark’s ScoutPal guide I then proceeded on with configuring the data that I wanted ScoutPal to send to me when I researched a book I thought might be worth selling.  The data I chose  ScoutPal to return to me was the Amazon’s price, the lowest used price, the lowest new price, the lowest collectible price, the lowest price overall, the sales rank and a formula. The formula is where you can set up an array that will check the criteria of what you have set up. For example say I wanted to have this formula check when I do search for books that meet $10 or more I would simply write the code up as:

if (lowest >= 10) {
return(‘BUY!’);
}
if (lowest <= 10) {
return(‘MAYBE’);
}
if (lowest = 2) {
return(‘KEEP LOOKING’);
}

Adam’s note:  Scoutpal is the book scouting application that I started with.  Prior to developing my own custom receiving application I also previously used Scoutpal in a different way (as a receiving application).  I would buy leftovers from sales and other places and have my employees sit and scan all day.  I used this formula that James is talking about extensively.  Just for illustration here is the one I used.  If you think about it logically, you can probably make out what it’s doing.  As you can see, Scoutpal is much more open than other scouting services and if you’re technically savvy you can really do a lot of things with it.  The only downside is that it doesn’t know anything about FBA offers.

salesrank = ’0′ . salesrank;
if (countused < 1){
return(‘List Stack (Lone Wolf)’);
} elsif (countused > 1000){
return(‘Discard. (Too much competition) Try bookscouter.’);
} elsif ((salesrank >= 1) and (salesrank <= 1000000)){
return(‘FBA Stack (<1M salesrank)’);
} elsif ((salesrank > 1000000) and (salesrank <= 3000000) and (lowest > 7)){
return(‘List Stack (<3M salesrank)’);
} elsif ((salesrank > 3000000) and (salesrank <= 5000000) and (lowest > 15)){
return(‘List Stack (<5M salesrank)’);
} elsif ((salesrank > 5000000) and (salesrank <= 20000000) and (lowest > 50)){
return(‘List Stack (>$50)’);
} elsif ((lowest > 35) and (salesrank < 1)){
return(‘List Stack (Unranked > $35)’);
} else {
return(‘Discard. (Salesrank/Price ratio too low) Try bookscouter.’);
}

Satisfied with the setup I waited till the weekend to venture out to the Friends of the Library book sale here in Richmond, Kentucky. Granted, it wasn’t the Wednesday night’s sneak peek. That is the night that vendors get to come and look through all the books that the library is selling before the general public gets to come in and purchase books from the library. Since I’m running my business here on a part-time basis I was not able to attend the sneak peek night due to two factors. One my current employment and secondly it was not payday for me yet.

Saturday afternoon my wife and I ventured out to the Richmond Mall where the Richmond and Berea Library sale was being held. My wife picked out some books, VHS tapes, CD, DVDs, Audio Books, and CD’s for me to research. I ended up hand entering each one that she placed in front of me and  consulted the results. I got a lot of maybes and 2 buys from the ScoutPal service. When we both were finished with book scouting we then walked our two boxes full of books and VHS tapes over to a counter to where I did a final analysis of my books. I then applied a six sided damage check to each item for any damages.  I then asked myself if I would buy this at Amazon if I was it listed. Four books out of my current selection didn’t make it past this point.  In fact, one of these really felt like it wouldn’t generate enough profit for me regardless of its condition. That decision was based on the sales rank of the item. In all I walked away only paying $34 and spent an hour book scouting. Now my next phase is to clean the new inventory up that I’ve got, set the price of each item and list them in my Amazon bookstore.

Also, by going to this sale I learned that for a $10 membership sign up fee the local library here will alert me of when they plan on having their next sale. I also left them with a business card too. As a side note, during my book scouting adventure there was a lady who was looking for a dinosaur book for her son. Naturally I had found one and despite the fact that the result I got back from ScoutPal about the book I quickly handed book to the lady and asked her if it was the one she was looking for. It wasn’t but the size of the book and the amount of illustrations of the dinosaurs that sold the lady on the book but the one I just gave to her she had exclaimed “This one is much better for my child.  There are more pictures in it.” She thanked me and my wife and we both told her she was welcome and we continued on with our book scouting. Yeah, I could have just said nothing and kept the book for myself and made a nice profit off it but in a way I made a customer happy at that very moment. I’m happy with what I have purchased from my book scouting adventure and just may go back tomorrow and see what else I might be able to get.

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Book scouting is one of the most important topics an online bookseller needs to understand.  Without proper knowledge of the ins and outs of this topic it can mean the death of your business.  Shockingly, most online booksellers still do not have a thorough understanding of book scouting and therefore are simply using whatever is provided to them by the few companies out there.  In this post, I’m going to set the record straight and lay out to you specifically what would be the ultimate book scouting application to give you a glimpse into what may be possible.

As I discuss ad nauseam in my eBook book scouting was started long before we had little Internet-enabled gadgets you could fit in a coat pocket.  The true book scout based all book buying decisions solely on experience and intuition.  Nowadays, anyone that has enough technological know-how can access a database of millions of books in a second without any prior experience.  This is now typically done on on the mobile phone due to it’s portability and Internet capabilities. According to a CBSNews article I’ve read recently the number of cell phones worldwide hit 4.6 billion recently.  This boils down to two things; the first is that as more and more mobile phones are produced the networks that these phones run on will become faster ala 4G and mobile phone manufacturers will provide more storage on the phones to accommodate for things like videos, pictures, emails, etc.  To even mention that a cell phone would have 32GB of storage just a few years ago would make any tech geek roll his eyes in a “yeah, right” fashion.

So what do these statistics mean to book scouting and to our ultimate book scouting app?  It means that mobile book scouting services will begin to take advantage of these new mobile phones and provide features never thought possible in the past.  The new Google Android phones are a great example of this and one company that I know of that has taken full advantage is FBAPower.  FBAPower (affiliate link) has a book scouting application called FBAScout that seems to have sprung up from nowhere lately to provide the online bookseller with much more information than your typical mobile application has in the past.  In fact, they recently wrote an article on the FBApower blog that inspired this post.

Even though mobile Internet speeds and storage has improved, book scouting applications will still always have to deal with limitations.  These limitations include a growing database of books on Amazon to query and lack of mobile high speed Internet coverage.  How are companies overcoming these challenges?  They are either giving you real-time Amazon pricing information at the sacrifice of speed or accessibility or giving you instantaneous price lookups at the cost of potentially using out of date information.  I wrote a post that briefly discussed the online vs. offline issue back in August.

Even though I use FBAscout nearly every day and continue to believe it is the best book scouting application out there, they tend to talk like it is the answer to book scouting and to FBA scouting.  To their credit, they are the only ones I know that are able to get FBA competition.  I do believe that it is very good but is not the only answer and may not be the answer at all to everyone’s scouting needs.  The only reason is because they have chosen to provide only one type of service and that is real-time service.  This method is crucial to get up to the minute pricing information from Amazon but also completely prevents a book scout of using the service at all if little or no mobile Internet service exists.  They suggest that this is not a big deal but coming from a bookseller that has visited many rural library sales with no WiFi or in basements where no mobile Internet service exists it happens.

What is the ultimate answer to the supreme book scouting service?  I believe it is a combination of a local database and real-time capabilities to properly address each issue.  Unfortunately, from what I have seen this does not exist yet however I’d love to be corrected if someone knows of one.  If a book scouting service could provide up to the minute prices for books on Amazon at the time of scan yet be instantaneous as a local database on the phone could be this would be it.  Let’s hope a company incorporates the best of each feature sometime soon and is finally able to overcome the mobile limitations that we all have to work with.

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It’s that time again to release another informative review of a popular book scouting service.  This week is it Media Scouter!  If you’ve missed any of the other review posts on book scouting services please check the 3 posts previous to this one and you will find them.

A book scouting service is a piece of software that allows you to look up prices for books at a library sale, yard sales, used bookstores or just about wherever  you are.  The only thing you need to get these prices is a personal digital assistant (PDA) or a cell phone running the Windows Mobile operating system.  If you don’t want to manually key in each ISBN you should also bring with you a barcode scanner.  Each scouting service provides this similar functionality but it’s important to pay attention to which one may fit your need the best.  If you’d like more information about getting started with book scouting or getting some additional reviews please take a look at my eBook Used Books: Big Business.  Book scouting is an entire chapter in the newly revised edition.

For this post, I’m going to concentrate on Media Scouter.  Media Scouter was the first book scouting service that I used.  I ran it on a Windows Mobile Treo at the time with a Flic scanner.  It was one of the only options I knew of at the time.  On a side note, do not buy the Flic scanner.  It works but it’s slow and very fragile.  Even though it’s a lot more expensive, if you’re planning on selling books online for a business go with the Socket 7P.  It’s got a lot more reliable scanner, it’s faster and it’s much more durable.

Two features that stood out for me were:

1. Database updated daily.  When a book scouting service updates their data what they really mean is when they go out to Amazon and pull all of the pricing information for the books.  Each service is different in the amount of time they update their information.  For the low sales rank, highly competitive books what this means is that the pricing information you’re using out in the field could be way off in just a few days.  Updating their database every day is very beneficial.

2. Search by title.  I get a lot of books that are pre 1970 that have no ISBN.  These books are typically passed up at sales because the other book scout may not have a service that will look them up or are simply too lazy to stop and take the time to manually look up a book.  Having this capability would prove very beneficial if you’re willing to work a little bit harder.  The only drawback to this is that the database to download is much larger and would take longer to download.

The pricing for Media Scouter is a little expensive at $40/month.  The only one that ‘s more expensive is Neatoscan at $50/month.  Again, if you’re just starting out give Asellertool or Scoutpal a try before you drop this much money a month on a book scouting service.

Other than what I mentioned, I don’t see a big difference between Media Scouter and all of the other services at this time.  I haven’t used this service in almost 2 years so I’m betting that it’s been improved on by then.  If you’re a current Media Scouter customer or have some recent experience with it please let us know in the comments section.

It’s time yet again for another review of a book scouting service!  This week’s pick is asellertool.  Asellertool is third in the list of book scouting service being reviewed in this series.  If you missed the previous two you can get Scoutpal or Neatoscan at their respective links.

The very first thing I noticed while doing some research on Asellertool is that’s it’s the cheapest real-time book scouting service you’ll find.  At $6/month they’re practically giving the service away but keep in mind the term “real-time”.  This is the codename for “Internet access required”.  For Asellertool’s $6/month plan you’ll have to have a cell phone with Wifi or some sort of other data connection or you’ll have to get yourself a PDA with a WiFi connection.  If you go scouting don’t depend on WiFi being available.  You’ll get lucky sometimes but more times than not you’ll not have any WiFi.  With this being said, don’t get excited about this being the cheapest there is.  Since Scoutpal provides both services; real-time and a downloadable database at $9.95/month Scoutpal is the king of price here.

If you want to step up to their typical “download the database onto your PDA/cell phone and scan books instantly” program you’ll pay $25.50/month.  Admittingly, it’s still not too expensive but don’t get the two service mixed up.  You’ll always want to go with the “offline” method to where you don’t have to worry about having an Internet connection when you’re out scouting.

The next cool thing about Asellertool I noticed is that it supports a lot of the international Amazon marketplaces.  What does this mean?  It means that you can download the pricing information from Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr for example.  What does this mean to a small seller in the US?  Probably not much but if you’re a little larger seller or you’re located in these countries this might be a nice option to have.

What sets Asellertool apart from the others is that they provide you with an Amazon listing tool.  As far as I know, no other book scouting service provides a tool to help you actually get the books on Amazon.  You would normally do that straight through Amazon or another third party service.  This is a very cool feature that comes with the service and at $25.50/month you can’t beat it.

Another cool feature of asellertool is the audio feedback.  Almost all of the other services provide some sort of audio feedback when you scan a book but asellertool lets you scan it once to hear the “Boo ya!” sound to let you know it’s a winner AND lets you scan it again to give you an audio response read of the market price on Amazon.  That’s a very nice addition to this service as well.  I’m not aware on any other service that can do that.  Take a gander at the video above for an example.

One additional attribute that I found about Asellertool that concerned me a little bit is how outdated their website is.  Also, if you look on the recent news section to the right they haven’t had any “news” since September of 2008!  I hope they’re continually updating the software else you guys have some really old data your pricing from!

Full and fair disclosure:  I have never used Asellertool before.  Because of this I emailed them prior to this post to give them a chance to give me the rundown on their product and heard no reply.  I hope this isn’t indicative of overall sales and support communication so your mileage may vary.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of asellertool.  If you’re using asellertool now or have used it in the past please sound off in the comments section as I’m sure other readers would love to hear some first-hand experience with the service.

As always, if you’re a new online bookseller and really want some in-depth content about how to get started, things to watch out, tutorials, etc take a look at my revised eBook called Used Books: Big Business.  The revised edition has a brand new chapter just on book scouting that leads you through the ins and outs of what it is and how it can help you achieve more profit from your used books.

Neatoscan is another popular book scouting service.  It is a service started in 2004 and has grown drastically over that time.  Neatoscan offers a few different services to a potential online bookseller.  The first is their typical database download and sync to your PDA for offline book scouting.  They have a lot of robust features in this software such as native sound notification for you to discreetly put some earbuds in and start scanning.  If you scan a book that meets the criteria that you have set previously it will give you a cash register sound, for example.  There are many other configurable options in this software which allows you to do just about whatever you’d like in terms of what criteria you’d like met before you buy a book.

They also have a service called Neatoscan Inventory Evaluator.  This is a piece of software that you install on your PC that allows you to input hundreds or thousands of ISBNs at once to evaluate books in bulk.  I have used this service for many months now and really like it a lot.  It’s very powerful if you decide to purchase books from wholesalers or remainder distributors or even to look up eBay lots in which the seller provides you the ISBN list.

Neatoscan is also very customizable.  If you need a change to the software or require some sort of special circumstance they will accommodate you.  However, it’s not going to  be cheap.  They’re standard rate is $150/hr.  I’ve had some work done by them and it’s top notch though and well worth it if you’re planning on really diving into this business.  Dennis is the man when it comes to programming.

Neatoscan’s book scouting service is $50/month for 1 account for standard level service or they offer a business level service at $100/month which comes with better support and some extra features that you don’t get with the standard account.  Consider Neatoscan once you’ve got your feet wet and know what book scouting is all about.  They seem to be placing themselves as more of the luxury line of book scouting services.