The most common question in the store is... "How does your trade policy work?" The first thing that needs to be clarified is that we do NOT buy books.  “Credits” as we call them hold no true cash value, we will not give you money when you bring in books for credit and you cannot cash out your credits at a later point in time.The credits as well as the cost of the books in our store are based on a percentage of the cover price of the book, or in some cases (collectibles, antiquarian, etc) the going rated for that particular book.  When you bring book into the store we will enter those books into out inventory system, which connects to a nationwide database, your credits will be calculated and entered into your “account”.  These credits do not expire, they will be there for you to use during that visit, next week or next year.  Your credits can be used to pay for half of your purchase on used book, in stock books.  If you have a specific question whether your credits can be used for a certain item, just ask and we will let you know.Another popular question is… “What books will you take in trade for credit?”We will sort through the books that you bring in as quickly as we can, but sometimes it can be a lengthy process as we really are looking for a lot of things. The three basic things we are looking at are a book's age, condition, and how many copies we may already have in stock.

 Condition... a baseline for this is if we cannot sell it in the store, then we cannot accept it for trade credit.   What determines if we cannot sell it?  Well, the books should not try to go swimming or be used as coasters (no water damage) nor should they have entertained pets or small children (no teeth marks, major rips, pages missing, etc).  They must have a cover and the bindings should be tight (or nearly tight).  A book with a broken spine is liable to start losing its pages after the next read--thus we do not accept those.  Hardback books must have their dust jackets.Side note: If the box of books you've been meaning to bring in for months upon months has been sitting in the garage the entire time... PLEASE at least move them to a new box so that anything that made it's home in the old one doesn't join us at the store.  It's technically not a *requirement* that anything is done with them, but if we are pulling leaves, dead bugs, and spider webs off of books then they just don't seem to be very clean anymore.

Age... we do wish that we could afford to keep every single book that came through our store--both old and new.  However, the new(er) books simply sell better for us.  Typically, we'd like the books that you bring in to have copyright dates newer than the year 1990. There are, of course, exceptions to that (This is where things get a bit trickier). Naturally, things such as The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice are not subject to these cut-off dates. A lot of it simply depends on us knowing which sections are selling well and which are not... which authors sell well no matter their age and which sit on the shelf forever... this does bring us to the next portion, though...

Whether we have it In Stock or Not... We are not a huge store, so we do have to be careful that we don't take 5 copies of a single title. Typically, we try to only take in 1 copy of a title at a time. As it has been out for a while, we often wind up with more than 1 copy--but that is why we begin with just a single copy. There are times that a book is a HOT seller and we are asked about it long before we ever see a copy. Those times we will likely take many copies of it (especially if we have a Reserve list for it). There are also times that we've had to discontinue a title (or author) for one reason or another--most often because they haven't sold in more than a year. Those items, we really cannot take any of.

Those are the Three basic criteria that we will check books for... yet there are also some things that we simply do not ever accept...

We do Not accept:
Book Club Edition Hardbacks
Harlequin Romances
Books on Audio Cassette
Reader's Digest Editions
Movies
Music"Our" books and their StickersSome of you may have read through the last topic and wondered if it applied to your books since you bought them from our store.
If you bring a book in for Store Credit and it is one of "Our" books... it will have our sticker printed on the back (don't worry if it's fading). This sticker is the same thing we scan when we checked you out at your time of purchase. For the books that you bring in to be considered "Ours" it must have its sticker, still.

We are currently switching to a new computer inventory system, which requires us to switch to a different sticker that will be on the books.  Our current computer system required that we switch to using these stickers for scanning purposes and we've been using it for roughly a Year and a Half, now. Thus, any books that do not have our sticker (even if you may have bought it from us 3 years ago) no longer counts as "Ours." It will be checked just as any other book.

What does it matter if a book is "Ours?"

If you bring in a book with our sticker on the back, then it does not matter how many we already have in stock.

We do still check "Our" books based on their condition, however. If it has pages falling out, water damage, or any other ailments that would not allow us to sell it again... we cannot accept it back. If you are purchasing a book from us and worry about its condition and whether we would accept it back or not... most often we CAN accept it back as long as it is in no worse condition when it is returned to us. However, we can never say for sure until you bring it back and we can take a look at it.

Technically, "Our" books are also checked based on their age since anything that does not have our sticker does not count as being "Ours."

So, the first two portions of how we check our books do still apply to those that have our stickers. It simply doesn't matter if we already have 5 in stock, already.