Several weeks ago, in a post titled What’s In Your Brain?, I mentioned Bookride as a resource for discovering profitable books that might be found at garage sales, thrift shops, and book sales.

Sites such as Bookride , while valuable for the information they offer, are often even more valuable for the bread crumb trails they provide to additional profitable information.

Here’s a good example.

Three days ago Bookride contained a post titled The Eye of the World. Robert Jordan, 1990. The post talks about the hardcover first edition of The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. (For your information, The Wheel of Time series consists of 11 books.) While an estimated value of $350-$800 makes the book look attractive, the small 1500 first printing means there’s little chance of one showing up at a garage sale or thrift shop in your area.

Not very likely this tidbit of information will put any money in your pocket in the next year or two. But if you read the entire post you find the beginning of a bread crumb trail worth following.

In part of the post, there is a quote from a respected bookseller that says, in part:

“…in one short decade, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has become the bestselling American fantasy series of all time–comparable in depth and scope to J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary trilogy,’ The Lord of The Rings.’“

“…the bestselling American fantasy series of all time…” is a bread crumb trail worth following.

We begin following the trail by going to eBay and doing a general search for Robert Jordan. We refine our search further by going to completed listings and sorting the results by Price: highest first. Here are the results we get.

If we sort through these results, among other things, we learn that:

• The series was published in both hardcover and paperback editions.
• Complete, or near complete, sets of hardcovers with dust jackets in nice condition often sell for between $50 and $100.
• Many of the books in the series regularly sell for between $30 and $60 in audio book format.
• Complete runs of all eleven books in paperback regularly sell for between $25 and $50.
• Partial sets of as few as five to seven books in either paperback or hardcover format can bring prices in the $15 to $25 range.
• There were comic books based on the Wheel of Time series that bring $15 to $25 when sold in lots.

While the chances of finding a first edition of The Eye of the World are pretty slim, by following just one bread crumb trail, we have discovered other related items (hard cover and paperback books, and to a lesser extent, audio books) that we have a reasonable chance of finding at garage sales, thrift shops, and book sales priced such that we can make a nice profit from them on eBay.

Scattered throughout Bookride and many other non-eBay sites are thousands of small bread crumb trails just waiting for a serious eBayer to follow. Some lead to nothing. Some lead to information that will put money in your PayPal account.

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