People ask whether eBay, Vinted and World of Books are our competitors. Technically yes, and it would be a bit cowardly to pretend otherwise. Practically, they are three very different businesses that happen to overlap with us, and the interesting question is not who wins. It is why a book behaves so badly on a marketplace built for anything else.
A book is an awkward object to sell
Think about what makes a book different from a coat or a phone case. It has a globally unique identifier printed on the back, which almost nothing else in a house does. It comes in editions that look nearly identical and are not remotely interchangeable, so the 2011 film tie-in and the 1998 first printing are separate objects with separate prices. Its condition is described by an established vocabulary that everyone in the trade understands. It is low value and low margin, so a pound of postage error wipes out the profit. And crucially, one seller almost never has one book. They have thirty.
Now look at a general marketplace. It asks you to type a title, choose a rough category, guess a price, and invent your own postage. Every one of those steps is a decision a book-specific system can simply answer for you. That is the whole difference, and it explains most of what follows.
eBay: the auction house that sells everything
eBay is the veteran and it is very good at genuine scarcity. If you have a signed first printing, a proof copy, a withdrawn edition, an out-of-print regional history that four people in the country want, an auction is the right mechanism. Competitive bidding finds a price that no algorithm can, and eBay has the audience to make that bidding happen.
Where it strains is ordinary books in volume. It is category-agnostic, so your paperback sits in a system designed with equal weight for camera lenses and lawnmower parts. Nothing knows what an ISBN is, nothing knows that "Very Good" is a term of art, and you carry the postage decision yourself. Sellers listing forty paperbacks by hand on a general marketplace tend to stop somewhere around book nine.
Use it when: the book is rare and the price is genuinely unknown.
Vinted: brilliant at clothes, coincidentally holds books
Vinted did something clever with second-hand culture in the UK. It made rummaging feel modern, it built a genuinely social feed, and it took the friction out of casual selling. Books turn up there because people clearing a wardrobe also clear a shelf.
But it is a fashion platform to its bones. Its search and browsing are built around brand, size and style, none of which apply to a novel. There is no concept of an edition, no author pages, no series, no way to say "the 2019 paperback, not the hardback". If you want a book to read, it works fine. If you want that book, in that edition, at a fair price, you are scrolling and hoping.
Use it when: you are already listing clothes and a few books can ride along.
World of Books: the industrial answer
World of Books deserves real respect. It operates at a scale most of us cannot imagine, buying and reselling used books in enormous volume, keeping many of them out of landfill in the process. If you want to hand over four boxes and be done with it, it is genuinely useful, and the environmental case for large-scale reuse is sound.
The trade-off is that it is a shop, not a marketplace. You sell to them at trade rates, they resell at retail, and the difference is their business, which is fair enough because they are carrying the warehousing and the risk. What you lose is the upside on your own books and any relationship with the person who ends up reading them. Nobody messages you about the book your grandmother annotated. It is a bulk disposal channel, and a good one, and that is a different thing from selling.
Use it when: volume matters more than value and you want the boxes gone this week.
So where does that leave us
ReReadz is a marketplace, like eBay, with peer-to-peer selling, like Vinted, but built entirely around the awkward properties of books listed above. Concretely:
- The ISBN does the typing. Scan the barcode and title, author, format, publisher and cover arrive. That is not a nicety, it is what makes listing thirty books plausible.
- Editions are first-class. Hardback, paperback, printing year, signed, first edition. A collector can find the copy they want, and a casual reader can find the cheap one.
- One condition language. Everyone grades on the same scale with the same guidance, so "Very Good" means roughly the same thing across every listing.
- Postage is settled up front. Flat rate, £2.99 for one to four books and £5.99 for five or more, with the label generated for you. No guessing, no losing money on a heavy hardback.
- Bundles from one seller. Three books from the same shelf ship together, which is cheaper for the buyer and less work for the seller. General marketplaces make this almost impossible.
- The reader stays in it. Bookshelves, wanted lists, book clubs and reading rooms sit alongside the buying, because people who sell books are usually the same people who buy them.
The honest bit
We are smaller than all three. On any given day eBay has more of the genuinely rare stock, Vinted has a bigger casual audience, and World of Books can absorb volume we cannot. If you have one very valuable signed copy, auction it. If you have four boxes to clear by Friday, weigh them in.
Where we think a book-shaped marketplace wins is the ordinary middle, which is also the vast majority of books in the country. The forty paperbacks on your shelf that are worth two to eight pounds each, that you would never bother listing one at a time, and that somebody in Sunderland is searching for right now. That is the pile that usually ends up in a bin bag, and it is the pile we built for.
Second-hand books are the original circular economy. They just need somewhere that treats them as books.