New or used books in the US, how the market actually decides

A few months ago I was at an estate sale in upstate New York, picking through boxes of books. One caught my eye, a hardcover history of jazz, dust jacket intact, looked like it had never been opened. And on the bottom edge of the pages, a clean black line drawn in permanent marker.

The seller wanted three dollars for it. I asked her: "Used?" She shrugged. "It's marked, so… not new. But it was never read."

That black line is what's called a remainder mark, and it sits in the strangest gray zone of the American book market. The book had never been sold to a customer. It came straight from a publisher's warehouse to a wholesaler at pennies on the dollar. By any reasonable definition, it's new. But list it as "New" on Amazon and you'll get angry one-star reviews from people who bought it as a gift. List it as "Used" and you're being technically dishonest, because it's literally never been used.

Welcome to the American book market, where, unlike France, Germany, or Spain, there's no law that tells you what counts as a new book versus a used one. There are decades of trade conventions, platform rules, and one particularly weird Supreme Court case from 1979 that, accidentally, created the entire modern remainder market.

Here's how it actually works, and what it means if you're reselling books in the US.

No fixed-price law: the US plays by different rules entirely

In France, Germany, Spain, and most of continental Europe, books are subject to fixed-price laws. The publisher sets the retail price and retailers can only deviate within narrow margins: five percent in France and Spain, zero in Germany. New books cost what the publisher says they cost.

The US has none of that. Books are treated like any other consumer good. Walmart can sell them at a loss, Amazon can discount the latest bestseller by fifty percent, Costco stacks hardcovers on pallets at half cover price. There's no federal cultural-goods price regulation in the US, period.

What the US does have, and what actually matters for the resale market, is the First Sale Doctrine under copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 109). The principle: once you've legally purchased a copy of a book, you can resell it. The publisher's control ends at the first sale. This is the legal foundation that makes the entire American used-book market possible, and it's why the line between new and used matters commercially even when no statute defines it.

So how does anyone tell a "new" book from a "used" one without a definition to point to?

The basic rule, same as Europe, just unwritten

The principle American booksellers have used for decades is functionally identical to the rules now codified in Europe: a book is "new" until it's been bought by an end consumer. Once it crosses that line, it's used, even if it's been sitting unopened on a shelf for ten years.

The key question: has this copy ever been in the hands of an end consumer? If yes, it's used, regardless of how good it looks. If no, it's new, even if it's beat up.

But here's where the US diverges from Europe in an interesting way: the condition taxonomy is far more granular than anything in continental law. Because there's no legal definition forcing things into binary categories, decades of trade conventions have built up to describe exactly how used a used book is.

The 1949 taxonomy that still runs the market

In 1949, a trade publication called AB Bookman's Weekly published a proposed grading scale for used books. It wasn't a law, it wasn't enforced by any authority, it was just one magazine making a suggestion to its readership of antiquarian booksellers. Seventy-five years later, that scale is still the foundation of how every major US bookseller describes condition. Amazon, AbeBooks, eBay, Half Price Books, Better World Books, Biblio, BooksRun, they all use simplified or expanded versions of the same hierarchy.

Here's the classic ladder, top to bottom:

• As New: Indistinguishable from a fresh-from-the-publisher copy. No signs anyone's ever touched it. Tight binding. Dust jacket present and unmarked.
• Fine (F or FN): Almost As New, but not absolutely fresh. May have been carefully read. No defects.
• Near Fine (NF): No real defects, but slight wear at the edges of the book or jacket. Used heavily by Half Price Books.
• Very Good (VG): Visible signs of use, but solid. No tears, no major issues. For most collectors, this is the floor of what's worth buying, except for very rare titles.
• Good (G): The "average" used book. Worn, complete, readable. Note the trade adage: "Good isn't good." Meaning: if the listing says Good, expect something visibly used.
• Fair: Heavy wear, but text and illustrations all present.
• Poor / Reading Copy: Falling apart, only good for reading. Pages might be loose. No collector value.

The system is voluntary. Nobody's going to sue you for calling a Good book Very Good. But repeat offenders take reputation hits on platforms, and on Amazon specifically, buyer complaints about misgraded books can suspend your seller account. Grading honestly is just good business.

Remainder marks: technically new, sold like used

This is where the US market gets genuinely weird, and where I want to spend some time, because it's the single biggest gray zone for resellers.

What's a remainder mark? A permanent physical marking on a book, usually a black line drawn with a permanent marker on the top, bottom, or fore-edge of the page block, added by the publisher when the book is liquidated as unsold inventory. Sometimes it's a dot, sometimes a stylized stamp (Random House used a tiny house, Simon & Schuster used their "sowing man" logo, Oxford used "OUP" in an oval). For paperbacks, it might be a hole punched through the cover or a clipped corner. More recently, publishers have started using a black or white sticker over the barcode instead of marking the edge.

The point of the mark is mostly accounting: once a book has been remaindered (sold off cheap to clear inventory), the mark prevents the same physical copy from being returned to the publisher a second time for credit.

So why are there so many remaindered books floating around in the US? This part deserves a small SCOTUS history detour.

The 1979 Thor Power Tool case

In 1979, the Supreme Court decided a case called Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner (439 U.S. 522). It had nothing to do with books. Thor was a power tool manufacturer trying to write down its excess inventory for tax purposes. The IRS said no, you can't take a deduction just because you think your stock is worth less; you have to actually sell it or destroy it.

The Court agreed with the IRS. And in doing so, it accidentally rewrote the economics of the American publishing industry.

Before Thor, publishers could keep enormous backlists in warehouses and write down the value as the books got older. After Thor, that became prohibitively expensive: every book sitting on a shelf was a tax liability that couldn't be relieved by simple depreciation. So publishers had two choices: pulp the unsold stock, or sell it cheap to remainder houses.

The result is the modern American remainder market: thousands of perfectly fine new books getting black lines drawn on their edges and shipped to outlets like Edward R. Hamilton, Daedalus Books, and the bargain bins at Barnes & Noble. Thor is also the reason American publishers keep so few backlist titles in print, once a book stops selling at full price, the math gets ugly fast, and pulping or remaindering happens within months instead of years.

So is a remainder book "new"?

Technically yes. The book was never sold to a consumer. The First Sale Doctrine hasn't been triggered. By the European definition, it's still new. But the market has its own opinion:

• On Amazon, listing a remaindered book as "New" reliably generates negative reviews. Multiple buyers have complained after receiving "new" books with black-marker lines on them, especially when the book was a gift.
• Serious booksellers use terms like "Bargain", "Publisher's Overstock", or "Hurt" instead of straight-up "New" for marked copies, to set expectations correctly.
• For collectors, a remainder mark can knock 30 to 50 percent off the value compared to an unmarked copy of the same edition. A mark on the top edge is worse than the bottom, since it's visible when the book is shelved.

The reseller takeaway: remaindered books are real opportunity (cheap inventory, plentiful supply) but they're also a real trap if you misgrade them. The right move on Amazon is usually to list as Used: Like New with a clear note about the remainder mark, not as New. You'll lose a little on price but save your seller rating.

The Amazon standard: simplified, but it's the one that matters

Amazon is dominant enough in the American book trade that its condition guidelines have effectively become the de facto standard, even on other platforms. The classic AB Bookman ladder gets simplified into five levels:

• New: Brand-new copy with cover and original protective wrapping intact. No marks on the cover. Remainder marks excluded.
• Used: Like New: Book may have been read but has no defects. Remainder marks allowed here.
• Used: Very Good: Clean, no defects, but light edge wear allowed.
• Used: Good: Signs of wear. Minor defects allowed: cut or damaged dust jacket, owner's inscription, remainder mark, light stains, dog-eared pages.
• Used: Acceptable: Pages and cover intact. Dust jacket or wrapping may be missing. Limited highlighting, underlining, or minor water damage allowed, as long as the text remains legible.

Amazon also maintains a separate Collectible category for first editions, signed copies, advance reading copies of out-of-print books, and rare items. Collectible uses the same condition sub-grades (Like New, Very Good, Good, Acceptable) but no "New" option, by definition, a Collectible book has special status that goes beyond New.

A few notation conventions worth knowing

When you read used-book listings on AbeBooks, Biblio, or independent dealer sites, you'll run into compact notation that confuses newcomers.

VG/G means "Very Good book / Good dust jacket". The first grade is for the book itself; the second is for the jacket. VG/- means "Very Good book, no jacket" (when the book originally had one, important distinction). VG+ means "slightly better than Very Good"; VG- means "slightly worse". Modifiers stack with all the grades.

Common defects also have specific vocabulary that tells you a lot about how serious the seller is. Shelf wear is rubbing along the edges from being stored upright. Bumped means crushed corners. Shaken means pages starting to detach from the binding. Foxing is small brown spots from oxidation, common in older books. Sunned is fading from light exposure. Cocked spine means the book leans when shelved. You don't need to memorize all of this, but recognizing the vocabulary in a listing is a good signal that the seller knows what they're doing.

What this means when you're reselling in the US

So here's how all of this lands when you're actually moving books for money.

If you're selling as a private seller (yard sales, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Mercari, Vinted), you're effectively dealing in used books across the board, even when condition is excellent. Pricing is fully market-driven, no platform polices you on grading at the casual level, and the upside is uncapped: rare collectibles can fetch hundreds of dollars when the market lines up.

If you source from estate sales or thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army, library Friends sales), the books were almost certainly purchased by an end consumer at some point. They're used, even when condition is excellent. Easy to grade: focus on the As New / Like New / Very Good / Good ladder.

If you source from publisher liquidations, store closures, or wholesale lots, you're often dealing with technically-new books that have remainder marks. Don't list these as New on Amazon: list as Used: Like New with a clear remainder-mark note. The price is lower than New but higher than typical Used, and the buyer feedback is dramatically better.

If you source ex-library books, list them clearly as ex-library. They're acceptable on most platforms but rejected by collectors. Better World Books has built a whole business specifically around them, so don't be discouraged (there's a real market), just don't try to disguise the stamps and stickers.

And the actual market price? This is where it really gets interesting. Knowing the legal-conventional status of a book is necessary but nowhere near enough. What decides whether you make 50 cents or 50 dollars on a given title is the actual market price: what the book trades for right now on the secondary market, not its cover price and not what BookScouter or Decluttr offers off the top.

That's why I built BiblioScan. You scan a barcode or take a photo of an entire shelf, and the tool returns the median resale price on the secondary market, the sales history, the number of transactions over the last twelve months, and an automatic ranking from most profitable to least. In a few seconds, you know which books are worth listing individually, which ones to send to a buyback service, and which ones to leave on the shelf.

The 1949 trade conventions tell you what condition a book is in. Amazon's rules tell you how to list it. BiblioScan tells you what it's actually worth. Together, those three pieces decide whether you make money on a given pile of books or just shuffle inventory around.

Sources

• 17 U.S.C. § 109: First Sale Doctrine (US copyright law).
• Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner, 439 U.S. 522 (1979).
• AB Bookman's Weekly: 1949 condition grading scale (foundational trade reference).
• Amazon: Marketplace Items Condition Guidelines for Books.
• AbeBooks: Guide to Book Conditions.
• Biblio: Guide to Book Conditions.
• Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA): Remaindered Books.
• Better World Books: Book Conditions.
• Half Price Books: Condition Guide.
• BookScouter: Book Condition Ratings Explained.
• Book Depot: Everything You Need to Know about Remainder Marks.

This article will be updated as platform conventions evolve, particularly around how Amazon and other major marketplaces treat remainder marks and the gray zone between New and Used.