How MyBookWorth Works

Get market values for your books using our search and scanning features

1. Describe the book

Enter the title and author, and add the edition or year if you know it. More specific queries produce closer matches — “Tolkien Silmarillion 1977 first edition” will find better comparables than “Tolkien” alone.

2. We find comparable sales

Your query is converted into a semantic representation and matched against a large collection of auction and marketplace records. This means we can find relevant results even when the wording differs from the original listing — a search for “signed Hemingway first printing” still matches listings phrased differently.

3. You judge the value

Each result shows the price the comparable copy was listed or sold at, with a similarity score and a link to the original listing so you can verify it yourself. We deliberately do not invent a single “your book is worth X” number — condition, edition, and provenance vary too much for that to be honest.

4. Or scan the cover

If you would rather not type, the Book Scan feature reads the title from a photo of the cover or copyright page, then runs the same comparison.

Why we do not give you one number

Most valuation sites answer with a single figure. We deliberately do not, because the data does not support one. The same title in the same year sells for €40 and €400 depending on condition, printing, completeness and whether the dust jacket survived — none of which we can see from your search box.

What we can do is show you the actual sales and let you judge which ones resemble your copy. That is a more useful answer, and an honest one. If a site quotes you a precise value for a book it has never seen, it is guessing.

What the results mean

Every row is a completed sale published by a third-party auction house or marketplace, with the price it realised and a link back to the original listing. Nothing is an asking price, because asking prices only tell you what a seller hoped for.

Each row also carries a similarity score showing how closely that lot matched your search. A high price on a weak match is the most misleading thing on the page — it is a different book that happens to share some words. How to read an auction result walks through this in detail.

What to expect

Realistic expectations save disappointment. Across roughly 600,000 sales, the typical lot made €60 and about seven in ten sold for under €100. Genuinely valuable books exist but are rare — fewer than one per cent passed €1,000. Is my old book worth anything sets out the whole distribution, and does age make a book valuable addresses the assumption people most often arrive with.

Before you act on a price, work through the evaluation checklist — condition and edition often matter more than the headline figure.