Second-hand books in Bengaluru: where to buy used books and sell your old ones

Church Street is the centre of it, with several second-hand shops within a few doors of each other, including Blossom Book House across three branches, Bookworm in the BPL building, Goobe's in the basement near K C Das, and Book Home in the space Bookworm used to occupy. Away from the centre, Surya Book Stall on Sampige Road in Malleshwaram, Book Fair in Koramangala 6th Block and Lightroom Seconds in Cooke Town all deal in used books. For academic titles, Avenue Road and the streets around Chickpet and Nagarathpete are where the volume is.

Avenue Road and the surrounding lanes are the textbook market, and buying back is a normal part of what those shops do. Published guides to the street report buyback offers ranging from about 50% to 60% of the printed price depending on the shop and the publisher, alongside discounts of 10% to 25% on new course books. Those are reported figures rather than posted rates: books on Avenue Road are rarely price-tagged, and what you finally get depends on the edition, the condition and how you negotiate. Take the books to a shop that stocks that subject.

Mostly credit, and it is the single most useful thing to establish before you carry a bag across town. The Church Street shops work largely on store credit against your next purchase, and reported accounts differ on whether cash or a voucher is ever offered instead. The Avenue Road textbook shops are the more cash-like end of the market. Doorstep and online routes are different again: a pickup service pays on collection, and a peer-to-peer marketplace pays only once your book actually sells. Every listing on this page says which it is.

Yes, with one trap worth knowing. Clankart is a marketplace where you list your own books at your own price and are paid to a bank account or UPI once the buyer receives and accepts the book, minus a seller fee. It pays the most per book and it pays slowest, because nothing happens until someone buys. BookChor does run a company buyback that pays cash directly, but its own FAQ states that route is currently available in Delhi only, so it is not an option from Bengaluru even though its shop delivers here.

PutForShare collects used books from your door at no cost and lets you decide what happens to the value, either taking the money yourself or passing half or all of it on so the books reach a student who could not afford them new. It is based in Bengaluru and states pan-India reach. It is the only doorstep option on this page, so treat a first pickup as a trial before committing a whole shelf to it.

They are part of the same trade and it would be wrong to look down on the pavement end of it. Bengaluru's biggest second-hand bookshops were started by people who sold books on the pavement first, and street vendors are often where a book surfaces before a shop ever sees it. What a shop counter adds is stock you can search, a person who knows what is in the back room, and somewhere to take a book back to. Buy from both. If you are selling rather than buying, a shop will usually give you more, because it can resell to a customer who came looking.

Open it flat in the middle and check the spine holds. Fan the last thirty pages, which is where missing or loose leaves hide. Check the edition and printing year on the copyright page, because for a textbook the wrong edition is worthless and for a novel it does not matter at all. Look for damp marks along the bottom edge, which is the one kind of damage that gets worse in storage. Underlining and a previous owner's name are not damage.