Do you realize that you can sell your pre-owned books via Amazon.com? You can also sell books that you pick up at yard sales and from thrift stores.

Well, it’s likely that is not news to you, especially if you’ve researched various ways to make money online. Amazon’s sellers’ program is a well known venue for pocketing extra change by listing and selling used books.

What you might not know is that it is really feasible to establish a good income as a bookseller affiliated with Amazon.

Now that could well be frankly difficult to believe if you got caught, as I did, in the great oversupply problem that struck Amazon’s used-book sellers a while back.

It was so easy to join Amazon as a bookseller that a huge throng of folks started doing it. The result was to drive down prices so far that some books were being sold for pennies – hardly worth the time and expense of packaging and mailing them to customers.

Nonetheless, it is is still quite possible to obtain books cheaply and then resell them through Amazon for $10, $20 or $30 each, and often much more.

Here’s the secret that makes this possible: You should get one of those handheld portable digital assistants. You attach a barcode reader to it, and download Amazon’s product database onto it. Then you just take your PDA/barcode reader with you on your book hunting trips. You can use it to check the current fetching prices of the books you find, and then only purchase those that you can see will bring in good money when you list them on Amazon.

Using a PDA with Amazon’s book prices information on it is the efficient way to run a used-book business today. The greatest benefit is that this will keep you from wasting your energy (and cash) acquiring books that no one wants.

There’s a good ebook available on how to make real money selling used books through Amazon, using the PDA secret. There’s a detailed, independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go directly to the book’s web site to learn more.

Selling through Amazon is not the only way to earn income with books. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined on this special Squidoo page.