Book Scouting Tools

Book scouting tools are aids to help a book scout determine the price for a new or used book. The tools will also show you what the book is selling for online and thus what profit margin you could expect to make on that book.

A good scouting tool will also tell you the rank of the book so you will know how quickly the book will sell or give you a ballpark frame as to how long you will have to keep the book to recoup your money and profit. Of course in reality the book scouting tool will only show you the rank and you will have to determine the timeframe as you gain experience.

The tools themselves will consist of either a PDA or cell phone. With a PDA you will be able to download the book database to the PDA and use it in an offline mode to scout for your books. With a cell phone you will be able to input the ISBN of the book into your phone get the price and rank of that book.

To further assist you with your book scouting you can also attach a barcode scanner to your PDA or phone. This way you will only have to touch a button and you will be able to have the book show up with no typing. This is a great timesaver that will make your book scouting a lot faster and easier. A barcode scanner is well worth the money and will quickly pay for itself in the amount of books you will be able to sell.

FBAScout if one of the best book scouting tools I have used personally. FBAScout is a book scouting software that will work with your cellphone with an internet connection. This tool is designed to work with Fulfillment by Amazon, but it is not necessary to use Amazon's fulfillment to use FBAScout.

The biggest advantage of using this software for your book scouting is that it will provide you with prices that other scouting softwares will not. It will show you the price for new, used and fba price. This is a critical piece of information since you will be competing with the price that the FBA sellers are selling their products for.

If you are not familiar with fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) I will be explaining it further on my blog, feel free to visit me at Book Selling Business for more information.

Not only will you see the prices for the books, but you will also see the name of the book, an image and most importantly the rank of the book. the rank is critical in determining how quickly a book will sell. I have tried other book scouting software, but this is by far my top choice.

You can get a free trial of the software and I guarantee the support for this product is one of the best I have encountered. I use this program with my android phone and scanfob scanner and couldn't be happier.