Psst! You! Yes, you. Got some books to offload?

Jason's Books & Coffee offers a buy/sell/trade program for used books in reasonably good condition.

The program is simple:

  • One-for-one trades of any title for any title. No paperwork! All we ask is that the books be roughly equivalent in value.
  • We sell used books for $5 each, regardless of the genre/length/trim size.
  • We buy used books regardless of the genre/length/trim size, as long as it's in good condition. We pay in cash or with a store gift card, at the seller's preference. Very small books/pamphlets are paid at $0.50, most mass-market paperbacks are paid at $1, and larger or more valuable books are paid at up to $2.50 depending on the title and its condition.

Some important caveats:

  1. We cannot purchase used books that are prohibited from resale – e.g., advance review copies or books with stripped covers.
  2. Each book must be reasonably saleable, which means that it needs to be in decent physical condition (no missing pages, torn covers, water damage, or broken spines) and be of potential interest to a general book-buying market.
  3. We reserve the right to decline to buy or trade if a given genre is over-represented or if it appears that the generous terms of this program are being unfairly manipulated (e.g., trying to pawn off a bunch of tiny pamphlets to stock a full classics library). We may also decline to accept books for which we already have several copies on the shelf, or if the book is fundamentally outdated — i.e., it trades in outdated medical advice. Conspiracy-theory texts are also not especially welcome.
  4. We ask that you drop off your books so we can have them inventoried and inspected and calculate what we owe you. That process generally occurs on Wednesdays and Fridays. After we've had that chance, we will prepare an envelope for you to pick up at your leisure. To minimize our financial risk, we do not keep large amounts of cash on-site, so we do not buy over-the-counter.