Oxford Dictionary among Top 10 most disliked textbooks

The Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary is among the top 10 bestselling second-hand textbooks that fresh graduates are trading in an online flea market, a sign of how much the dictionary and other textbooks were disliked by their owners, Hong Kong Economic Times reported on Tuesday.

With the approach of graduation season, many students from universities in China are selling their textbooks and study material on Xianyu, Alibaba's online flea market, according to the newspaper.

The top 10 bestselling list included textbooks and reference books in economics, English, math and computer programming. Other now-unwanted books are those that prepare students for the graduate entrance exam, the civil servants exam, and qualification exams for accounting and financial professionals.

Local media reports said that some textbooks were so disliked that they carried a price tag of one or two yuan, and even as low as 0.0001 yuan.

By contrast, dozens of copies of economics notes by a graduate from Nankai University were sold at a price of around 100 yuan a copy.

Data from Xianyu showed that second-hand textbooks accounted for some 58 percent of all items dumped on the sales portal by fresh graduates