Orca Books Buying Policy
**PLEASE NOTE: FOR THE TIME BEING WE ARE ONLY OFFERING CREDIT FOR USED BOOKS (see details at the bottom of the page)
We buy books every day of the week, with no need for an appointment.
Our buying hours are 11am - 7pm Monday-Saturday, and 11am - 5pm on
Sunday. We will stop buying early if we're having an event, so please
call if you plan on bringing books to sell in the evening.
We're a general book store, so we buy selectively in all fiction genres and all non-fiction subjects. We also buy some VHS tapes and DVDs.
How It Works
Bring your books in during our buying hours and a buyer will look at
them as soon as possible. We prefer to look at your books while you
wait, but exceptions can be made if you make arrangements with us
beforehand. We'll go through the books and make an offer in
credit (for cash, see note at the bottom of the page).
If you accept the credit offer, we will add the total to your account in our
database. Trade credit never expires and doesn't require you to keep
any sort of voucher. Our system is backed up every three hours and we
store a paper copy of each credit slip that's entered into our system,
so your credit is always safe with us. If you don't have an account, a
name and phone number are all that's required to create one. Multiple
names can also be kept on one account. We take privacy seriously and will never use your information for any purpose other than to access your account, and we will never sell or lend it to any third party.
The Offer
What we pay for used books depends on what we believe we can sell them
for. The credit offer is typically half of our projected selling
price. So if we plan to sell a book for $10, we'll offer $5 in credit.
Our selling price is based on a number of things: the current new
price, the going rate on used book sites like Alibris and Amazon, the condition of the book, and the
popularity of the author are just a few. But in the end
it's simply the buyer's best guess at what the book will sell for.
Please note: Books frequently sit in our storeroom for weeks or
months before they are cataloged, and our actual selling price is based on the
market value at that time. What we paid for a book does not absolutely
dictate what we will sell it for.
A Few Tips
Condition is a major factor in determining whether to buy a book. If a
book has notes or highlighting; water damage or other stains; foxing or
other discoloration; previous owner's inscriptions, book plates, blind
stamps, or other "ex libris" marks; excessive edge wear; or creases
along the spine, there's a good chance we will pass on it.
Also, while there are exceptions, as a rule we try to avoid the following:
library discards
book club editions
multi-volume sets (like encyclopedias or Time Life sets)
magazines
Reader's Digest condensed books
hardcover fiction that's out in paperback
games or puzzles
the works of Ann Coulter
It's not that we dislike any of these things (with the exception of that last one) -- they just don't sell for us.
We frequently deal with twenty or more boxes at a time, so quantity
isn't a problem. If you're bringing down ten or more boxes we'd
appreciate a call first to give us a heads up, but it's not required.
We prefer to do all buying at our store, but if you have 2,500+
books we might be able to come to you. Please call 360-352-0123 and ask for Troy or Sarah K. if you have a
collection that's too large to transport.
We do not give estimates over the phone. We will not do appraisals of items you're not interested in selling.
**If you are only interested in getting cash for your books, we do sometimes make exceptions. Please call (360) 352-0123 and ask for Troy, Sarah K., Sonja or Larry before bringing your books in. We can usually tell by asking a few questions over the phone whether the books are ones we might pay cash for; however, the final valuation (if any) will still have to be made in the store once you've brought the books in, and nothing we say over the phone should be taken as a guarantee that we'll buy (for credit or cash) books we haven't seen yet.
ALSO, be aware that the cash offer is usually half of whatever the trade offer would be, so taking credit is still a better deal.
