Student textbook sellers find campus niche

Chris Bennett's walls are lined with books.

The Wharton junior's bedroom is filled with scores of textbooks, but not because he's taking any extra classes. Instead, Bennett helps other students sell their old course books -- his room is simply the storage facility.

Bennett runs Liquidbooks.net, a company he founded to make getting rid of old books a little easier.

Liquidbooks -- the brainchild of Bennett and Wharton and Engineering junior Samantha Durante -- provides a book pickup and cash dropoff service.

Customers sign up for the program online; then Bennett and Durante personally pick up the textbooks that students want to sell.

When Liquidbooks started a year ago, it had about five customers. That number has grown to 89, and about 800 textbooks are now crammed into Bennett's room.

He says that Liquidbooks has sold almost two-thirds of them during the past semester.

"We use Amazon, Half.com, Collegedeck.com, and PennforSale[.com] to sell the books," Bennett said. "We also incorporated this feature on our own Web site, so you can scroll through our inventory to buy and sell."

When a book is sold, Bennett and Durante deliver the money to the seller. If books do not sell online, they are returned to the original owner.

Customers typically receive 60 percent of the selling price, while Bennett and Durante pocket the remaining 40 percent to cover the delivery costs.

Bennett and Durante started Liquidbooks because they were frustrated with on-campus options.

The Penn Book Center, for example, does not buy back textbooks. The Penn Bookstore pays up to 50 percent of the original cost for hardback books and only a small percentage of that for paperbacks.

According to Rhea Lewis, a spokeswoman for Penn Business Services, of 55,000 books sold by the bookstore, about 4,000 have been bought back.

"We realized we could give students more money for their books while making a profit for ourselves," Bennett said.

"We wake up at 8 a.m. every day," Durante added. "We pick up and deliver between 4 and 9 p.m., which really allows people to sit back while we do the work."

Bennett has hired three part-time employees to help pick up and distribute the books.

Whereas textbook exchange sites such as Collegedeck require students to become members and arrange their own pickup and delivery locations, Liquidbooks takes care of both.

The business uses its competitors to sell the books by becoming members of their Web sites.

"I was never into selling my textbooks," customer and College junior Jesse Sirotkin said. "But Liquidbooks.net made everything easy."

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