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To keep costs down for my students, I've been thinking about offering them the chance to sell their piano books back to me for a lower price, providing they're still in good condition and all pencil marks have been rubbed out, and then offering them to other students at the lower price. Has anybody tried this? I suppose there is a risk that a parent and I might disagree on whether a book is in good enough condition. Any thoughts? I'm new at this, so keen to hear advice from more experienced teachers, before I go ahead and propose it.

Am I being over-idealistic in thinking that pupils would want to keep their books, either:
1 To come back to occasionally for pleasure.
2 To use as sight-reading material later.
3 Purely for nostalgic reasons.

I can see tovka's reasoning, but I would not suggest it to my pupils. Dare I say that I still have some of my first piano books from 50 years ago?

I quite agree. Whilst some pupils would appreciate being able to buy books for less and not so bothered about them being pre loved; keeping them is preferable. I've still got a lot of music on my shelf that I used to learn with as a child and find much of it useful today as a teacher.

It all depends upon space and circumstance though. Sometimes you need to get rid of stuff even if you would prefer not to!

But will that not increase costs for you?

I think you need to be sensible on this one. As teachers, we try to encourage our pupils to expand on repertoire and coming back to exam pieces and even those which were not prepared for examinations is very good for sight reading, repertoire (for higher grades) and even for looking back on when a similar piece of music notation of language appears in a later piece.

Grade exam books try to provide a cross-section of what it takes to play at that level so it is undoubtedly the case that there will be some useful references and skills which may be revisted or transferrable to other pieces. I still have books going back 20 years when I started!