After you plunked down a couple hundred bucks at the beginning of the semester for all your textbooks, you're no doubt looking forward to the week after finals when you get a chance to sell them back. Hopefully, selling them is worth your while and that Biology textbook that cost you more than $150 will be worth the trouble. Before you pack them all up and head off to the campus bookstore- wait a second. Over the years, scores of websites have popped up specializing in the reselling of textbooks. Many of them cater directly to college students and work to give you the best price for your used books, often much more than what you'll get at your campus bookstore. But not all sites are created equal. Some offer more money, others offer easy payment through PayPal, and others are just best to avoid.

So where does one go if they're looking online to sell back their books for a reasonable price? Since so many sites appear to offer such a service, thank goodness for Book Scouter.

BookScouter.com is a fast and easy portal that searches through many book reseller's websites and gives you clear and easy results to make selling your textbooks as efficient and profitable as possible. I decided to put the site to the test and to see which sites out there gave me the most bang for my book buck. Here's what I found:

For my test book I wanted to see how much I could get back for my 2008 edition of Chemistry: Structure and Dynamics by James Spencer. Currently retails at $106.93 through Amazon.

I found the ISBN number and plugged it into the search on BookScouter.

Right away, the site searched through 36 databases of known book buyers and offered me a handy list of sites. In this instance, Textbooksrus.com offered the most money at $40.24. Not bad consideringthe store on campus won't offer anything once the 5th edition comes out. In comparison, the lowest amount offered was through Bookturtle.com at $4.50.

But perhaps the best part of BookScouter is the other information listed in your results. Icons indicate whether they pay by check, through PayPal for added convenience, if they pay for shipping, provide address labels, and more. There's even a section for user comments so those who have used these sites in the past can evaluate them. A lot of these comments have saved me from selling back books at less-than-savory places which seem legit but, according to reviews, either take months to send payment or don't pay at all. For my example, I see that the comments for Textbooksrus.com are favorable so I feel confident in doing business with them.

Naturally, the more people who use this site and comment, the better the experience for everyone. So for those of you that want to get a little bit back on your investment but are either disappointed by how little the campus bookstore offers or don't want to go through the hassle of Ebay or Amazon should check out Book Scouter when you go online to sell back those used textbooks.

Poll 

Where do you sell back your textbooks?