Buying and Selling Books on Half.com. About a year ago, I heard about a place to buy used books at half-price on the internet, half.com. I searched it out and found that you could buy new books, very used books, and books in between. Many of them could be purchased at much less than half price. Its not a store like Amazon. It is a meeting place where people can list their books for sale at whatever price they like.

Half.com is a sister site to ebay, except it works the other way. On ebay, a person lists a thing for sale and then potential buyers bid on it. On half.com, would-be sellers list their book at a price they set, competing with each other, and lower their prices when their book does not sell.

I have both sold books and bought books on this site. In the past year I have sold nearly $800 in used books. I just went through the house, pulling down books I haven't looked at in years and had no further interest in. Then I listed the books for sale, according to some very easy steps that the site describes.

When someone buys a book, I get notified. That buyer would have an account at half.com, probably connected to his credit card, and that account would be charged. Every two weeks or so all of my sales for that period are accumulated by the half.com wizard and dropped directly into my bank account, less a commission.

When I receive my notification, I put the book in an envelope and mail it to the person described in the notification.

One can buy and sell videos and dvd's on half.com. The other day I was looking for an old western with Henry Fonda, "My Darling Clementine". I checked an internet movie site that would have charged me about $11 to rent it for a week. But I found it on half.com for $3. With the postage, that purchase came to a little over $5. And it was not a rental. I now own that movie. Its amazing.

If you want to see what I have to sell, go to half.com and search for books by a seller known as "stokes70". If you are one of my children, you probably ought to check the site anyway, because I just may have listed one of the books that you left behind. I'd be glad to sell it to you.