Selling Second-Hand Books: My First Experience with BoekenBalie

I had a long weekend free and decided to complete my library dabase. In the process I discovered a couple of books I have 2 copies of. Some time ago we were discussing with friends about buying and selling second hand books and they were using BoekenBalie because it is an easy process to sell your books with them. The process is indeed easy, create an account, download the app and you can scan the ISBN codes of the books you want to sell. The app immediately gives feedback about the expected price they will pay you for the book and in case they are not interested you get this feedback immediately in the app. This avoids sending books and then learning they cannot accept them. So the process is indeed very user friendly. Once you have scanned the book you can click to accept the price offer and then once done you get a label which you can print and put on the shipping box. The box with books you can then leave at a DHL drop off point, no shipping costs involved. So far so good. Unfortunately, in my case it looks like the books I had were of no use to them. There were 4 books of Ward Ruyslinck, a Belgian author that was mandatory reading in the old school days. I also had 5 books by Willem Frederik Hermans, a known Dutch writer and 7 books from a set of 10 thriller books from various authors translated into Dutch. It turns out that almost none of them could be accepted except 1 thriller for which they were offering 0,5 euro and then 1 euro for ‘De donkere kamer van Damokles’, a famous book in Belgium and The Netherlands, a million copies were sold. This was a disappointing result to put it mildly. Out of curiosity I decided to have a look at their website and they had 4 copies of the book with prices between 5 and 17 euros. My copy is pristine, never read as it is a double, so 1 euro seems an extremely low price to get. I looked at what you have to pay for it new and the current price is 22 euro, the edition for which Boekenbalie is asking 17 euros. I also looked on Alibris via isbnsearch where they had 2 copies going for 66-100 euros. These are old editions from the 1970s so maybe collector’s items, not sure. Looking on the site of De Slegte, ‘The’ second hand bookstore in Belgium I didn’t find collector’s editions of the book, only standard ones for around 12 euros. Selling second hand books seems to be a hard profession, not surprising as selling new books is already a struggle.