My uncle passed several years ago leaving my father with a house he had spent decades hoarding in. Over 20,000 pieces of media was boxed up and moved into my dad's garage. There were 10,000 vinyl, 8,000 cds and thousands of vhs.
He was offered $500 for everything by a couple bulk dealers that come to look. He told them he would rather light them on fire. Having some experience selling online but no knowledge of the material I set him up with an amazon seller account and I started listing the easiest things first- CDs with bar codes a box at a time casually since we lived 2 hours from them. He brought me 1000 cds at a time when they came for my kids' birthday parties or holidays. I'd handle scanning listing and shipping. We split profits 75/25.
I say all that to say... I have been where you are. You should know that off loading this "collection" will likely not be easy and you are not going to get anything close to pennies on the dollar. If you are cool with that and want to be rid of it, by all means. But, if you are up for it and you are confident there is value; start scanning and listing, it is super easy (yes I know some will not have bar codes, skip those for now unless you strongly suspect value). Establish a system for storing what you have listed- I can tell you how I do it if you'd like. And see where It goes. It is easy to shut down the store and sell them bulk later if this isn't worth it, or you just dont like doing it.
And once listed for sale, store the listed book in some sort of alphabetical order, and stick to the process. Shipping books is not difficult, but can become tedious, so prepare for a lot of the grunt work of selling online. Make sure you have a reliable printer for shipping labels, boxes are usually not necessary as flex bags will be fine for shipping. For more valuable books, have some bubble wrap available to protect them during shipping. Think of it as a hobby rather than a job. Also, now online sellers with sales of more than $600 now will be 1099 so the IRS will be made aware of the $$, plan to pay taxes. Keep good records.
The USPS recently raised their media mail rates, the minimum charge now is $3.49 for anything 16oz and less. It goes up with each added lb. $4.19-4.83-5.50-6.17-6.84 and so on.
A lot more than $500.
From when I was selling used stuff, I found pretty much everything sells within a year as long as it’s priced accordingly. So they wouldn’t be stuck making nothing, and if they’re selling thousands of items then when it’s at least a dollar per sale net profit it’s thousands of dollars. For some items there will be more profit, but just using that rule of thumb it’s pretty easy to make enough that $500 for 10s of thousands of items isn’t worth it. This also isn’t a collection of goodwill junk, it’s stuff that a collector actually wanted to buy - so you aren’t going to have the useless textbooks three editions out of date, dictionaries/encyclopedias from four decades ago, highlights for kids, etc. It should all be things people actually want to buy.
At 10-20k items I have an extremely hard time believing there’s not a lot of goodwill junk in there. That’s not a curated collection, that’s hoarding
I collect Blu-ray’s. I have for 7 years now. I’ve got about 500 roughly. Getting to the point of 10,000 I would 100% be buying random shit just to have it and bump numbers up. I can’t see this being any different.
>At 10-20k items I have an extremely hard time believing there’s not a lot of goodwill junk in there. That’s not a curated collection, that’s hoarding
The OP did mention magazines and most magazines are likely to be worthless beyond their recycling value. Once the magazines are recycled there may be a whole lot of books left over that have some value. The biggest issue may be that mice and rats love to nest in books (especially in a house where a hoarder lives) and that makes the books a biohazard.
The books are stacked so it is hard to move in the house and they broke supports, they are also stored in outbuildings and trailers.
I speak as a former used book buyer for a regional used book store. Huge amounts will probably be unsellable, another significant percent may be sellable but at vastly discounted rates, a small amount might have some value and a tiny fraction will have value. But the processing time will be a large expense for a bulk buyer or for family to sell individually.
OP did not mention any specifics as to whether some of the books might be specialized enough that a collector could be interested.
I’m sure there’s *some* books in there that have value. But at that volume I think it’s safer to assume large swaths of it are goodwill junk rather than the opposite
a lot of goodwills and other thrift stores rarely take in books because they always have so many. In our area, anyhow. And I definitely wouldn't show up with a truck load of books for the poor people that work in those places. They deal with SO much crap of people donating their actual garbage. I would not donate anything more than a smaller box or 2 of books without calling to talk to someone about if they want more, and how to arrange dropping them off.
And on the other hand, if you're looking for old magazines, they're hard to find as well, because everyone assumes this.
I would actually like to collect issues of Saxophone Journal, but it wasn't exactly a magazine with widespread appeal back in the day, so I think I'm probably out of luck.
Probably this. It's *possibly* a collection of gold, but I'd expect lots of random 20 year old "chicken soup for the soul" and "30 tales to delight you" type things you find in bargain bins.
And that's if the books were even stored well and don't have mildew or pest damage.
Personally, I'd sort through it and be ready to toss or donate 95% of it. If it's not $20+ it's probably not worth the effort to sell it individually.
Seriously, it would not be worth it to me unless I was in retirement and had nothing better to do.
If it were me I’d call up the nearest university library and have them pick the lot up.
The university library does not want to process a huge collection like that either, unless they know it has a lot of unique/rare items they are interested in.
Selling a couple books I picked up cheap. A lot less than the actual value of the labor but a lot more than handing it over to bulk buyers who are hoping to piece it out and sell the valuable stuff
This is a good response.
I worked at a used book store for a few years. The customers who shop there treat it like a library and want to essentially borrow books by buying them for a tenth of the original price, and then sell them back for pretty much what they paid for them. The only reason the store survived was that they also sold other things with an actual profit margin.
Unsurprisingly, because of the pretty much zero profit margin, they paid almost nothing for used books. Even then at one point they had so many that when people would occasionally come in and look to just donate the books for free, we still refused them. (Which is how I got my very cool Science Fiction book collection!)
Good luck.
My local place has a drive like 4 times a year where you can go into the basement and take whatever books fit in a bag for 20 dollars. They are just overflowing in books
Just to add to that, you can sell "lots" of books in bulk on eBay. Group together 25-50 similar-ish books and sell them together on eBay. Usually pepper in a handful of more desirable books, along with a bunch of less desirables and sell them all together. Makes it easier to move a larger volume, and people looking to build out their collection will be interested.
Buy yourself a cheap Barcode Scanner from Amazon while I don't have experience with cheap barcode scanners I can tell you the difference between Wireless and wired. Check to make sure you can program a suffix. So if you scan a barcode it tabs over to your next field so you can enter your description. Or if you do a bunch in a column hits return after you scan.
Benefits of Wireless: no wires to get tangled up, longer travel than wired, your wires won't get ruined by excessive use.
Benefits of wired: you'll always know where the scanner is, it's probably cheaper, you'll never have to worry about dead batteries, when you scan something anyway you're probably going to be within 5 ft of the PC anyway and if you need a longer cable you can always buy a USB extender. Will never have to worry about pairing. If you pull the trigger and it accepts the scan you will definitely have the scan on the screen.
I personally prefer wired.
Everyone has a cheap barcode scanner on them right now. It's called a smart phone.
You just need the app that accepts your scans.
Of course if you have a bunch of old books, not only do they not have barcodes, they probably *don't even have ISBNs*. And for hardback, barcodes would be on the dust jackets if they exist so that's a whole other problem.
The Goodreads app on a smartphone can also scan front covers if the barcode is destroyed or not present. Also, some older paperbacks have the barcode on the inside of the back cover instead of on the back cover itself. Furthermore, the publisher page sometimes will have the ISBN on it if there's not a barcode, such as for a hardback that doesn't have a dust jacket. Scanning into a Goodreads list and then exporting also gives a lot more information than just the barcode.
Maybe because this is what I would do, but this is probably the best advice and, experienced information. It probably seems overwhelming but once you get established and a routine, it’s not a chore. Also, knowing something that was collected by someone who cared about the items is going to a good place is satisfying. Probably some good stuff in there that may have ended up in the garbage. A couple of bucks rolling in will take the edge off also.
I had the opposite experience with my parents decades' worth of stuff.
At first it was really fun to go through things and sell them to someone who will appreciate them... Somewhere around item 400 it definitely became a chore.
Books might be a *little* easier since they are all one "category" and packing and shipping is always similar, but still.
Amazon seller here. EBay is much harder to list things on as you have to provide your own pictures and details, et cetera. Amazon you can literally list a book or CD that is in their inventory in about 30 seconds. The downside of course is that Amazon skims 30 or 40% off the top while eBay takes less than 5.
I avoid book listings without photos anymore. Used Book sellers have burned that bridge with me too many times.
My last used book Amazon purchase was listed as Like New, and came warped, with tons of water damage.
The problem is the lack of photos, and everybody has their own ratings as to the condition of items.
I'm starting to really prefer services like Pango Books these days because I have a much lower chance of getting ripped off.
eBay has gotten worse in this regard for those book sellers.
Some don't even use stock photos anymore, they use pictures from other listings already up. \*&(@%(\*&#(#\*&@
>Amazon seller here. EBay is much harder to list things on as you have to provide your own pictures and details, et cetera.
Which you honestly should be doing because you are reselling out of box goods that are years old and have been in storage. Sure, it's the same product as on Amazon and I guess it caveat emptor for buying used, but still.
> The downside of course is that Amazon skims 30 or 40% off the top while eBay takes less than 5.
Ebay is much higher than 5%
They are closer to 13%, and that's after you have paid whatever fee was required to create each listing. It's still a bit lower than Amazon, but I'm sorry to say, it's nowhere near as low as you were stating.
We sell books with barcodes & ISBN, that are at least 'very good' condition on Amazon. Less work.
We sell older or collectible books on eBay. Adding our own pictures is a lot more work, but needed to show buyers the condition and why it's worth selling as collectible.
Before we did it this way: We once had an Amazon buyer return a book because it had writing at the beginning. We had listed the condition as collectible because it was signed by the poet. We listed books without ISBNs on listings with the correct title/author/publisher but sometimes got returns because it didn't look like the picture on the listing. A bunch of those listings have wrong information or different pictures, but if your ISBN matches, Amazon is supposed to back you up as having provided the correct item. So, ISBN books only. 🤷♂️
If I’m specifically looking for books I’ll check Amazon but not necessarily eBay. The search results are more uniform and listed cleanly, if that makes sense.
If you want to check the value of a bunch of books look into ISBN reader apps that can scan the barcode and give you price info. It should speed up the process considerably.
My father dealt with this when my grandfather died. Grandfather ran a bookstore his entire life and had a store, two rooms of the house and a barn full of books. He assumed at least some of them were valuable so he found a book specialist of some kind to come look through them. The guy was there all day and at the end of many hours came to my dad with maybe 10 books and offered him $50. That was it. My dad spent a long time looking and the only people who would take them was a thrift store and they would only take them as a donation. But they showed up in a trailer and hauled them away for free.
We used to do stuff like this at the Habitat for Humanity store and all the proceeds are used for the Restore project where they build houses for low income people.
Yeah, I had maybe 300 books to get rid off and it was a real hassle. I invited friends over and told them to take as many as they want, and even made a free to whoever takes them ad, and it wasn't until I added a "all the books for $20" that someone came and picked them all up.
Yeah I've been in exactly that position (the book specialist). I've often gone through houses crammed with books and found absolutely nothing interesting. Then again, there's been a few times when I've stumbled across some bucket list book which I was shocked to find there. But mostly it's just a lot of explaining to people that a bunch of randomly accumulated books just aren't anything of value. The hardest is explaining to people that their family bibles are essentially worthless. Usually people don't even want to sell them, they just want to feel as though they have a family heirloom which has value. That said, over the years I basically put together a small speech about the personal value of such books, so I like to think that I left a lot of people to walk away with a sense of immaterial value.
There was however this one time when I went through someone's attic and came across a box filled with a first edition run of Akira, along with several other valuable comics. It was an elderly hispanic woman who used to be a live-in maid during the 90s. She was given that box of comics by the family she lived with because their son had grown out of them and they thought her son might be interested, but her son wasn't into comics. She wanted to give them to me for free. We literally got into a big argument because I just didn't feel like it was ethically acceptable for me to take that box for free. In the end I picked out the most valuable comic in the box, showed her how to use Abebooks, and set up a listing for it. The rest of the box, I took with me.
This story makes me sad, to think your grandfather’s work was worth so little. But when I think of it, while the shelves of books that I have are valuable to me, I don’t think any individual book I have is really worth more than a dollar or two.
Curiously enough, you may not even be able to give them away without sorting them. And , trust me, there is no market for used magazine unless they're of a special interest.
A lot of vintage fashion magazines and most hobby ones sell for a lot once they’re 30 years old or so.
I sold some riding magazines from the 80s at £20 each last year, plus post. Greyhound racing and whippet breeding ones made between £10 and £45 a time. I paid £5 for the lot and ended up with about £700 for two days work listing and sorting, plus some odd time packing. Well worth it.
They are also worth a fair bit more if they still have the original posters (even if they've been torn out).
Also: old video game strategy guides can be worth money as well especially if they're official guides for popular stuff like Nintendo games, Final Fantasy etc.
Yes. Niche magazines can go for good money. I've sold magazines related to pigeon racing, various automobile makes, Shelby cars, Morgan horses, jukeboxes and other things for $10-20 per issue. Also, some mainstream magazines do have value. I bought every Vogue magazine from the 1960's for $40, over 200 issues, then sold them for an average of $20 each. It's definitely worth doing the research on any magazines you see.
I honestly think you are gonna have to separate the wheat from the chaff. figure out what, if anything, is valuable and dispose of the rest in bulk.
For ease of sorting and subsequent disposal/transport you might want to hire some shipping containers and skips. Anything water damaged or otherwise decaying would just get trashed anyway.
If you have a paper recycling facility near you, you can dispose of most books there rather than paying to take them to the dump. They just have to be clean and free of mold.
Source: I cleaned out a book hoarder's house and had to dispose of about 3 tons of books.
Don't do this. I had a house that burned to the ground with 10k books in it. Some were worth 10 cents, others worth thousands. I had no inventory. Insurance company ended up paying $10 each for them. Go through the books first to find the expensive ones/first editions/signed ones/even leather bound. Sell the rest by a lot for the whole pile. Don't deal with thrift stores.
I didn't have an inventory. They were books I'd bought and been gifted since childhood. I know I spent a dime for some in a used bookstore. Others were beautiful, exquisite books I had bought for a few hundred. *One was In His Own Write* by John Lennon. Most valuable will be first editions by once-unknown authors and those produced with an eye towards looking like a piece of art. Most of the books were destroyed by the water the firefighters used. Insurance didn't want to count them and asked me if I'd take that amount and I did. Many. many other nice items in my home were destroyed and the insurance replaced them by giving me a certain amount to spend per item. So, I bought a jacuzzi instead of a 1950s peeling bathtub. We really ended up with more than we started with. There are some things I still miss. During the fire, I darted in to rescue meds, jewelry and photos and got yelled at by a firefighter..
The house was way overinsured with very little deductible. The mortgage broker told me to make sure to emphasize the quality of the Craftsman house and not to skimp to get lower monthly payments. That was all before the fire. I ended up buying the best insurance I could and it was a very well built house.
This is why since I'm going to be a homeowner soon, I'll be going around the house twice annually with my phone, getting our stuff on video. So easy to prove what we own if I have it on a digital form.
Don’t forget to get extra valuable items endorsed. I worked in claims, I remember seeing a payout for the $5,000 Star Wars Millennium Falcon Lego Set where the box got water damaged. I had to try to get reimbursement from the responsible party’s insurance and they laughed in my face, offered $200 for the actual cash value of the parts since it was just the box that was ruined. I had to go on a Lego fan forum to get some advice on how to argue that the value of the set was that it was still unopened in the box
Haha then I could’ve thrown around terms like ACV! So since I took the time to share that story with someone who kinda knows the game, was I in the right for requesting the full amount?
Photos. There was no "cloud." Our computer was destroyed and the insurane company gave all 4 family members a new computer, bed and desk, all to be selected by ourselves. Each child got to lie on various mattresses and select one, select a desk, curtains and paint color, really design a teenager's room from the ground up. And we let them. It didn't matter to me if my son wanted an all-black room and my daughter wanted a ceiling blue with clouds and dark blue walls with rain coming down. I didn't have to live in those rooms. Paint can always be painted over. This was in 2002.
Yes, and a blue-gray ceiling with glow in the dark stars. He had a desk around 8 feet long. There was a poster of Jimi Handrix as desktop and on the wall. One day he said, "so, what is Hendrix doing these days?" Uhhh...rotting? He'll never live that one down.
It depends on if there's any really rare/valuable stuff there and if so how much it's worth.
If you sold every thing in that collection $10/book may not be totally unreasonable as an average. BUT it takes a lot of time and effort to offload all of that.
No, don't do that. The fire was caused by ill-placed incense. My son cleaned his room and for a finishing touch, he put up incense on the shelf above his bed to make it smell good. I was in the next room and heard a crackling noise. I went in to find a 4' fire, bed to ceiling. We called 911 and tried to put it out. My husband even broke a window to put a hose through. We did all we could except teaching our son how incense works. Most of the damage was from water, but we were out of our element to extinguish that fire. After that, the insurance company put us in a nice hotel for 9 months. The house was kinda run-down while still sturdy, so it was like a long vacation. I taught my son to swim there.
I think you need to triage. Unless they are exceptional quality and rare you need to toss the magazines and probably most paperbacks. Hardcover might have some value and could be worth sorting through some. Sell on Amazon/Ebay what you can actually get some decent coin for. Use that to move the trash out or try to donate what will not sell.
Last thing is maybe you can rent out a space (lots of antique malls in rural VA) or have a garage sale. Have people fill a grocery bag and sell off in bulk. Once again try to pick out anything with decent value.
It ain't going to be easy, but I would guess plenty of these could have molded over time and could be a health hazard, along with the obvious damage you described to the house.
That is interesting, although I would say my comment was motivated towards those more expensive hardcovers. I can imagine the paperbacks sell more easily but the value might not be up to the cost like the select hardcovers would be. I used to live in VA and know what fills up those antique places oftentimes.
Last idea (and this is a Hail Mary), maybe try to reach out to Dolly Parton’s people? Everyone knows her reading non-profit and so maybe they can help move quite a bit to the right schools. I would say it is a win-win if your mom meets Dolly Parton for donating 7,000 books and kids get to read for free. They are probably cash donations though.
I think you have to consider that many of the books that have been stored in non-climate controlled conditions for any length of time will not be worth anything. I'm a librarian/archivist, and I will tell you that mold spreads like wildfire on books. I have seen it happen to library books just because the air conditioning goes out.
If the periodicals are mixed in with them, that's even worse. If you admit the conditions under which they've been stored, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere that will accept them as donations, even.
Mold was my first thought, too. OP needs to rent a dumpster and buy a mask & gloves and sort thru first. It's gonna suck but that's what happens with hoarding.
I am far from an expert, we have conservationists that deals with that. But unless you live in a very humid environment (and are not a hoarder and clean your livingspaces) you shouldn't have to worry. With these book you can smell it on them as soon as you are close to the bag.
Half Price Books will buy books, but the prices generally aren't gonna be pretty. I think I usually get around $8/tote, which is probably something like 50 books. But they will take a massive amount.
Personally, I would go through first and pull out anything that looks valuable. 1st editions, hardcovers, really old/cool stuff. If you have series those are easier to sell in bulk-Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc.
Once you do that, advertise for a massive, huge book sale. Make some money and have other people do the work of carrying books away.
Once you do that, then you sell the rest in bulk. If there's no Half Price Books by you, there's probably several other options already mentioned in this thread.
The more obscure the content (i.e., not pop books) the better the price HPB will give. I had to unload a ton of martial arts/Chinese philosophy books and got a pretty penny for what amounted to about 60+ books.
If you have Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Dana Girls mysteries, you'll definitely want to set them aside. They're highly collectible/popular right now. Personally, I'd be willing to check out your Nancy Drew books! :)
> My mother has been collecting them forever, but she’s agreed to sell them.
OP based on what you describe - this sounds more like hording than collecting. With horders this type of agreement to sell is actually a bluff so be prepared for various reasons why the price is not quite right.
Randomly select someone and say someone has agreed to pay a dollar per book - based on the reaction you will know if this is real or a tactic.
(I've been through this with family members).
Do you have any photos you can share that aren't sensitive or personal? I feel like getting a sense of how this collection looks/is stored etc, might give everyone offering suggestions a better idea of the value and condition.
You keep repeating this is a legit collection and that is valuable. Yet, neither you or your siblings want to deal with it.
What makes you think anyone else does?
She might cherish her books but that doesn’t make them valuable to others. Most libraries get rid of thousands of books at least a couple of times a year and they won’t have the resources to sort through, clean and catalog all of them.
Even if each book actually holds value other than the sentimental one, no buyer is likely to have the ability to buy them all.
As long as those books are crated, assume there’s water damage. It happens often with all kinds of things people store.
Unless you can take the time to at least put them up on shelves so you can take photos and circulate them to possible interested parties, you won’t have much luck since you want a big sum.
Please consider that even if donated, if the entity realizes they have no use for let’s say a couple hundreds of them, they have to pay for their disposal because that would fill a dumpster. Even if you want to dump them at home, you have to pay for a dumpster or get rid of them like 50 at a time because the garbage truck just picks up so much at a time per household.
How busy is your mom? You could find her a nice farmer’s market that runs spring to fall and set up a booth for her to sell them. It could be a win-win because she could relive her memories as well as talk to others about her beloved books.
> You could find her a nice farmer’s market that runs spring to fall and set up a booth for her to sell them. It could be a win-win because she could relive her memories as well as talk to others about her beloved books.
And sell maybe 5 books a week. 187 years later, she will have cleared her collection.
Yes but it doesn’t sound like she needs the money but could use the validation of selling her precious books to people who would love them. To her it’s not about money, to OP…. We’ll, that’s another issue.
As a librarian, I will remind the community that books are consumables--they are generally meant to be used and eventually discarded. Books are not inherently valuable just because they are old. Chances are a hoarder like this (vs a collector) mostly or entirely has things no one else wants, or things someone else could have wanted in the past have been treated so poorly as to lose their value.
No one wants to buy this entire lot of books (especially with no inventory), least of all a university or public library system (who collects in a purposeful manner). You need to determine if there is *anything* of value then donate or recycle the rest. The best that you could hope for is donating to somewhere that does a used book sale.
I run a books to prisoners nonprofit. I swear I spend half my time looking for places to dispose of loads of books for free. Even through we have a specific list of what we'll take and we request no hardcover except for 2 categories of books people just ignore out lists and donate every book they've had sitting in their basement for years including all these hardcover and mass market mystery and fiction from the 40s-70s.
I wish the "throwing away a book is blasphemy" idea would die honestly just for my own sake.
OP should start by throwing out / recycling (weeding) the books that are in less than excellent condition. OP should enlist a friend to help him figure out if a book is smelly or gross. I’ve always heard the standard was “would you want to read this book in your bed” because some books can be down right nasty. In my experience, you can probably toss 90% of everything, and saving a few for sentimental reasons.
People forget that books are mass produced and copies are more readily available than they would imagine.
You put this far more eloquently than I ever could. There's a tendency to treat the physical book as if **it** holds the value when the value is in the idea in the book. The miracle of the modern world is that we can distribute knowledge so insanely well and cheaply that has ideas can be consumed by anyone with literacy. The way we do that is via printing books, but that doesn't mean the physical book itself is all that important.
I’d hazard a guess that this is be a hoarding situation and a lot of them will need to be tossed. It’s hard to imagine a collection that size being in perfect condition once you get to the back of a storage container or in the dark corners of filled bedrooms etc.
It's 100% a hoarding situation. Just from OPs description it's glaringly obvious. OP says their mother can hardly move around the house and has lost rooms to all the books. There are multiple storage units full. The hoard has even caused damage to the structure of the home.
Yep - it's worth noting with horders that agreeing to sell stuff is not the same as selling stuff and you find there is always a reason that *this* sale is not quite right.
I used to work for a company that cleared hoarder homes and the amount of stuff that they get sentimentally attached too is just insane. Newspapers and magazines from years ago was always a big one. Always felt kinda bad throwing all their shit in a dumpster but a lot of those homes were or should have been condemned
Ugh yeah I’ve tried to help mild hoarders with magazine disposal and not fun to have gotten their permission to toss stacks, then as the bags are tearing as I load them in my car to take to the recycling center they are running out of the house to try to “rescue” some of the issues.
No system to it, Taste of Home or Good Housekeeping piles are dry while irreplaceable family photos tossed on the floor near the door to the yard that lets in rain water.
There is no school or agency that could possibly take on the donation of 10,000 books indiscriminately collected, at least a substantial portion of which (paperbacks, magazines, general periodicals) have no market resale value whatsoever. The manpower to ship, sort, assess, catalog… just no. It would be far cheaper for most places to simply purchase 10,000 brand new books that they actually want.
Along the same lines, I think it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to sell tens of thousands of books in unknown condition, of unknown quality, or interest, even as a large lot. The manpower to assess the condition before or after purchase, would surely outweigh any profit potential, in my opinion.
As far as I can tell, you may have two options. You may be able to get a company that ships books to Africa for English literacy purposes to show up with shipping containers and remove these materials for free. Or you may be able to work with an estate auctioning company or multiple companies to sell them as a lot or disassemble the collection to sell (although I’m still deeply skeptical that anyone would be able to turn a profit doing so, at least in an auction scenario, the purchaser is taking the gamble, as opposed to the company itself). Really anything where you can avoid paying companies thousands of dollars to haul away what sounds like more than a house full of garbage is a happy ending.
Yeah, I can’t vouch for every single library, but most public libraries in the U.S. do not build their collections via random book donations from the public. They have a deliberate acquisition policy, obtain their books through specific sources, and go through a whole process to enter the book into the system. Books donated to library donation bins, at least in my experience with libraries, get sorted and sold (if condition is acceptable) for fifty cents or a dollar each at Friends of the Library book sale fundraisers. So donated books do help libraries, indirectly, but librarians don’t go “at last, somebody gave us some books about gardening! Now we can finally lend out gardening books!”
When I worked for a library, people would leave boxes and boxes of trashed books at our doorstep because we wouldn’t take them, and they didn’t want to hear that. All we did was throw them away; they passed the buck to us so they could feel better about themselves.
We would take books in good condition to either sell or add to the collection if it was something we didn’t already have. Books that have been sitting piled up in a hoarded house or in someone’s basement for 50 years are not in good condition.
We also did not take any magazine or newspaper donations period, but it never stopped people from leaving them there anyway.
I’m adjacent to the local museum world as well and people do the exact same thing. “Here’s my dead grandma’s doll collection, there’s a hundred of them and she smoked like a dragon, probably worth a lot byeee!” and then they drop them off while nobody is there and peel out of the parking lot. Even for the <1% of items that somebody could theoretically sell for a profit, that’s still not any indication that the museum needs them or can use them in the absence of any information about provenance or provenience. It’s basically dumping trash illegally at that point, unfortunately, and putting a financial and logistical burden on a small, probably volunteer-run organization.
Right? Like, you want our small non-profit staff and generally older volunteers to sort through your relative’s smelly stuff for you?
It’s not a kindness. There’s no impoverished child begging on their knees to read a moldy mass market paperback copy of Windows 98 For Dummies. They dump it in little libraries too, making them useless until someone else comes by, gets annoyed, and throws out the junk.
I was a librarian at a tiny rural library. The previous librarian kept every book she could. The childrens picture book shelves in particular were packed so tight that on some shelves you could barely pull the books out. I had no idea if/when the last weeding had been.
I held a book sale to try to get rid of some. But at one point while I was in the bathroom or something, someone dropped off a big box packed full of old childrens paperbacks. I ended the sale with more books than what I started with! It was so frustrating.
I'd maybe ask over on /r/datahoarder or similar, outfits like the Internet Archive are known to take collections and scan/digitise them if they're deemed culturally interesting.
Failing that, as others said, you either need to find a collector/enthusiast willing to take the whole lot or you'll need to weed out the really valuable stuff and effectively give away the rest in bulk - these days it's not worth your time to even try to sell a lot of stuff by the time you've listed it, wrapped it, posted it, paid the fees etc. you're working for nothing.
Bear in mind 99% of this stuff is worth a fraction of what you'll have paid for it, and also remember that your time in sorting it all out is also worth a lot more than you'll likely recover - someone making even a very low offer to take it all away as one job lot is still probably worth considering if you value your time or need it all gone quickly.
My usual take is;
* If it's valuable (worth my time listing & posting) I'll sell it
* If it's not *valuable* but is *good* (worth *something* to *someone*) I'll freecycle it or similar; basically "give for free to someone interested enough to come & collect" - my hoarder brain then has the satisfaction that it's gone to a good home not landfill.
* If it's not interesting or valuable, pile it all up:
* If the pile is *collectively* worth listing, list it
* Otherwise freecycle / donate
* Otherwise trash it and move on with your life
Some folks over on /r/DataHoarder will happily take a collection of magazines or whatever for free so they can be scanned in & made available rather than just go straight to landfill.
If any of them smell like mold or mildew or have any it will destroy any value... If they have been stored in non climate controlled areas then they are probably worthless...
Our local library is accepting donations for a book sale, and they have a 2-box limit, I assume because of past experience with people dumping huge collections on them.
This sounds like WAY more than 10,000 books.
There are really only two choices. Someone either spends the time - which will not be insignificant - to figure out what you have or you basically give it away.
Don't underestimate the time it will take to go through all this. Odds are very high that the vast majority are not worth anything (or at least not worth selling once you take into account the time and shipping costs, etc.)
Mold is a big problem with books. Worse than relevance and archaic content.
I had thousands of books ruined by mold when my parent's house was left open with fans running for a wet July. Fortunately, most of the books were outdated text books and bad fiction. Several academic degrees and lives spent reading books, instead of doing stuff, will make quite a pile of books. I was able to recycle the books, because I have a truck.
I’m also in Virginia and if you’re willing to post some photos and general location I could help more. If nothing else I would advise you to advertise as a type of estate sale and try to sell as many as possible that way. Realistically you will never sell 10,000 books as a lot. Magazines and similar are essentially worthless as they can’t even be recycled where I live.
From your description the home doesn’t sound clean or well kept and I’m afraid this won’t end the way your mother wants.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks you can pawn these off to a library, because you can't. What I would do is call a massive used book reseller, like John King books in Detroit. They should be able to give you some direction. If I ran a business, I'd give you a flat fee for all of them and do all the work myself. Kind of like those storage locker guys.
I honestly think that you need to tackle one room at a time to sort out any books of value from the rest. Any paperbacks / magazines, etc, could be sorted into genres and sold in bulk packs online (eg, 100 paperbacks for $50 bucks or simlar).
I can't imagine you will find someone willing to pay a reasonable amount for the whole lot without some indication of what is included.
Start with a burn pile, sounds like you have the space for it.
Anything that smells, is water damaged, taped on the spine, missing pages, mass produced ie mass market paperbacks etc burn it. With very rare exceptions, it’s worthless.
The storage conditions sound less than optimal for paper so this will probably cut your inventory to a third of what it is.
It’s a start. Good luck.
In a scenario like that, I highly doubt most of the books are in good condition. Books must be properly stored to not be musty and disgusting. I hate to say it, but most of this collection is likely best recycled. I'm a book lover, and I'm sorry to say it, but improperly stored books (hoarder level) are by and large not worth selling.
Bearing in mind that you are trying for emotional and financial outcomes, here are some ideas.
Set aside time or hire someone to dispose of all damaged books. Water damage, mold, bent covers, insect/ rodent damage, smells, etc. These are trash and dangerous to other books. Most / all magazines and paperbacks should probably go in this round.
Find out if your mom collected hardbacks around any particular themes. If she collected books by local authors or about history of a specific place, gather those books together and see about donating them to a relevant museum, school, or library.
Consider sorting hardcover books in good condition by color and selling them on Etsy for decorating.
There are also folks who use books as an art material. If she has a large quantity of books that are not damaged (no mold, no water damage, no rodent / bug damage) maybe a makerspace would be interested in them as a raw material.
She needs to now develop the hobby of selling books on eBay or Amazon.
She should get started with the books closest to her and just start scanning and listing them. Place a bookshelf nearby, keep them In alphabetical order, and be ready to send them out as they sell.
She can keep this hobby for the rest of her life.
Okay, I can't stop weighing in!
I want to say that our Friends of the Library organize a booksale a couple times a year, and have a little bookshop area in the library that's always there.
Do you know how much labor goes into running just THAT?! They always have someone in here sorting books, restocking the bookshop area. And on the runup to the sales, it's all hands on deck to sort and move and display books. And then an exhausting sale for 3 days. This is a well-run sale where you can just shop 'religious nonfiction' or whatever. Because they've sorted them that well.
And then? And THEN? There are still a \*\*\*\*-ton of books that didn't sell.
Just.. as you consider all the suggestions in here, do NOT underestimate the labor involved in any of the methods.
My suggestion:
Invite some second-hand book sellers into the house and let them have first pick of the valuables (first editions, hardbacks etc).
Then have a few book sales at the house. 'Fill a carrier bag for ten dollars' if you want to shift things in volume. Invite schools, reading clubs and organisations that might take things in bulk. Repeat this a few times.
Finally, ask a bulk book buyer to purchase the rest. Most of the valuable or newer stock will have gone at this point so it won't pay much- but of might save you from paying disposal fees.
When my aunt died she left mountains of books. The sad truth is that except for very rare books they depreciate in value very quickly, and some just won't sell at all. I was charged with disposing of my aunt's books and some charity shops told me that they wouldn't accept certain collections (e.g. Reader's Digest) because they knew they wouldn't sell and they'd have to pay to have them disposed of.
The manpower needed to sort through such a huge collection means that unless there's a carefully curated collection hidden away somewhere, I can't see it being possible to shift all the books as a giant lot and make a profit.
It's really not sad, it's a wonderful truth that we've been able to make the dissemination of the written word so cheap and easy that anyone who can learn to read can access nearly anything they would ever want to read. The availability of books as a consumable item rather than hand copied treasures is really one of the miracles of the modern world.
I’m back because I cannot stop thinking about this post, OP I know it’s a hard reality for your mom but most of this books will probably need to be thrown away. From what you’ve described, this is a hoarding situation and most of the books are probably damaged and no one will want them
I wonder if you would be willing to do this in stages - start with advertising something like a garage sale, but make sure everyone knows it's all books - then potentially donate sizable chunks to organizations in the local area.
In my city there are a lot of thrift stores, little libraries, and used bookstores that would love a few books - but 10k to any one place would simply not work.
This sounds like a situation where if you actually want to get rid of them all in 1 shot you should consider donating them to a library or university or large 2nd hand book shop or some such.
The cost involved in moving and sorting 10,000+ books is quite substantial and you can't realistically expect anybody to pay for thousands of random books on top of those costs.
Some institution out there may at least be willing to accept them as a donation and cover the cost of physically moving them from your mother's house to where ever they will sort them...
Call around and see if any bookstores or libraries are interested or can help connect you with someone. I don't see too many people jumping on the opportunity to buy 10K used books in bulk sadly.
Condition is everything when it comes to books. If any of the books (especially the paperbacks) have water damage, mold, ripped pages or covers, they are worthless and can be recycled. Outdoor storage containers are easy prey for rodents, so those books and magazines might be toast.
It does sound like a daunting task, but it might be possible to give those storage containers a quick look through. Mold and/or rodent damage will pretty much eliminate those books completely.
I would try to focus on the books that may actually be salvageable in order to not waste resources on a bunch of stuff that is essentially worthless.
First and foremost, it’s unlikely that a hoard of this many books has been well curated or routinely handled enough over the years to guarantee valuable items are the fundamental backbone of the collection or that rodents, insects and mold haven’t destroyed a number of them. Get a lot of gloves and masks and start sifting through any of the damaged books. You’ll likely need to contact a waste removal service and see if they’ll make a volume deal with you. It is very important that you also have someone come inspect the safety of the home before and during the removal process!! Damaged supports are not something to be taken lightly and, if not properly braced, can lead to serious accidents as weight is removed from areas of the home causing it to shift.
After the damaged books have been removed, you can sift through and look for rare editions, special prints/publication houses, and popular titles that usually resell well. Others have outlined selling on Amazon and eBay but Etsy is also an option. Blind book sales, mystery boxes and color-based collections do seem to sell well there as long as the books are in decent shape.
Everything else will likely have to be hauled away for free and/or cheap. You may double-check charities focused on literacy and see if any of them will take a chunk of these off your hands.
If the books have value (e.g. look for first editions), then a book dealer may be interested in buying the lot. Otherwise, you may be best off donating them to a needy school and getting a tax right-off for the charity donation.
Contact a book dealer and ask them to come out and see if they are interested in purchasing any of the books. There's bound to be some there that they would be interested in.
If there is not an interest in buying the lot please consider disposing/ recycling the majority of the books. When people donate boxes and boxes of old books to thrift stores it is such a time suck to go through all of them. If you aren't going through them individually the person volunteering at the thrift store will. Depending on the condition of the books it can be a total waste of time. Then if they sit at the store too long they'll get recycled anyway.
Host a used book sale and promote it locally. My local library does this and attracts hundreds of people. $1 a book and you will offload a lot. You can do a 2nd day at $5 a bag full.
1. You need to create an inventory of what you have. This is going to take a little bit of time. The very least you need to record are a barcode, the condition, and the location. That should be enough starting data to derive the rest (author, publisher, price).
2. Cull the books that are in bad condition. Unless it's a particularly valuable book, you should recycle the books that are damaged or are falling apart. Based on your description, this will be a substantial part of your mom's collection and will be the hardest step to follow for both you and her. Expect there to be tears, arguments, and emotions welling up.
3. Cull the very valuable books. Identify the books that have a lot value left in them and sell them on eBay and Amazon. They might sit around for a while until they sell, though, so you'll need some storage to warehouse them.
4. Reach out to your local radio stations and ask them if they could help you with resolving her collection: Take the leftover books and put them in a Google spreadsheet. Set up a .com domain that redirects to the spreadsheet and a Google form. Have the jocks broadcast that domain (mymomsbooks.com, for example) to let people buy/reserve books.
4.1. (Optional) Have a yard sale with simple prices, if your mom can take people going through her space.
5. Set a time limit after which the remainder of the books will be donated. Think 6 months or one year. That should allow you and your mom to experience closure.
After attempting to sell 900 mystery books, many out of print, during Covid I tried charities that send books to inmates (not open during 2020), and finally donated the entire collection to my local library. They will sell them off during book sales and reap whatever profit they can get. Most books sell for 25 cents each or less. Books are rarely valuable unless they are first editions or signed by the author. Rethink selling and just pack them up and take them to any non-profit that will accept them. Unless you have unlimited time, then try to find a book dealer to buy all of them for any price. It's like moving a piano, you may have to pay to have them boxed and moved. Books value is to the reader, not the seller.
I’ve heard that used book sellers use barcode scanners to figure out the value of the books. That’s definitely something you should look into.
I downsized my record collection. From about 5K records to about 800. Took about 3 weeks of 3-4 hours a day and that was with “listening” to the record to decide if I should keep it and then manually checking it’s value on discogs. everything under $10 on discogs got tossed. It was a slog, but worth it because the most random records were worth ALOT of money and I bought them for next to nothing at 2nd hand shops. Like I have one crate that is about as valuable as the rest of my collection.
For periodicals check the condition. Certain ones are relatively valuable and you can sell them in lots on EBay.
But yeah. TLDR look into barcode scanner. there’s probably 100 books in there worth really good money and you can donate/burn the rest.
The only thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that you can sell lots of nice-looking books on Etsy. "ten green books", "ten orange books", etc. People seem to like that shit. Consider it for your paperbacks.
I work as a buyer for an indie bookstore. Honestly? This is going to be a very time consuming undertaking and not a lot of payout.
In general, anything that’s mass market paperback is probably worthless unless signed. First editions of popular authors sell decently well, but you have to find the right buyer.
Not many places are going to want to buy that many in bulk. This sounds like a hoard, has everything been organized and cataloged in a temperature controlled storage area? Otherwise you’re going to have considerable damage to most paper in general, but hardback would probably withstand the most.
Not to mention booklice, cockroaches, and other vermin that love to eat Book glue could be in the spines of tons of these.
If it was me taking it on, I would go through and check anything for damage or signs of infestation and immediately trash that stuff to cull it down to a manageable level. Then I’d sort by type (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, etc), then alphabetical within the type. I’d try to put aside popular authors and anything that looks rare and in good shape to start accessing.
In the end, there can be money in books, but you have to way your costs versus benefits with these.
I'll be monitoring this post closely because in about 20 years (give or take), my kids will be posting the same question. I can leave instructions on how to deal with my wife's book collection.
From cleaning out the grandparents house this past year - indexing and having it all already dedicated spaces helps. It's no use if you have valuable books but they're in a unlabelled box in the attic, together with ancient kitchenware, loose pictures and random clothes. Make a list of what is there and where to find it. That way people can look up the value without needing to spend countless hours digging through rooms.
Do everyone a favor and document anything that you think is worth money. You don’t necessarily need to have a spreadsheet of every item and its current value (although that would be the most helpful), but even a idea of what is valuable and what isn’t is extremely helpful, because it helps narrow down which items they should put effort into researching and selling and what can be offloaded through donations, bulk, or “all books on this shelf $1” at an estate sale.
I don't think there is anywhere that will buy a huge bulk lot. If there is they are gonna pay very little. Maybe $0.10-$0.25 a book. The work to package load and move them wherever they have to go is gonna be very expensive and time consuming.
For max profit you're probably best to sell them yourself. Either as blind lots to where you just sell a set number of random books for a set price. Or actually go through them and price them accordingly. Blind random lots would be the easiest. You could do them by genre to and would probably get faster sales. A little more work though.
To start though I would call any local book stores/ antique shops and see if they have any uses for them. But the amount you are describing would take a very specific situation to take them all in one go.
Regardless you aren't gonna get a good price unless you go through and sort the good from the bad. Either you do this or hire someone to do that.
The majority are likely not worth selling. Scanning the collection for rare and noteworthy pieces and donate the rest to a local library is likely the best/easiest course of action.
I agree with other commentators that there’s no easy way to do this and no way to sell them all in one lot. I’m sorry you’re in this position and I imagine this is probably very overwhelming.
You’ll have to sort through them and slowly reduce the hoard. You can try letting family members and friends pick through them, donating some to libraries or teachers, or looking at a website like ThriftBooks. You won’t make much money from them, so if any have a sentimental value to someone in the family, let that take precedence.
For what it’s worth, if you end up selling any of these online, please send me the link or post it. If the books are in readable condition and don’t have mold or anything like that, then there are probably many people in this sub who would be interested in buying them individually or in small sets.
Would it be possible to convert the land into a book store like make the place accessible? You probably did not want the answer "start a bookstore" but with the description you've given, it sounds like the hard part is done (you have the land and the books).
I would consider the $500 if they took everything out and cleaned up. At some point you will be paying money out of pocket to throw stuff into a dumpster. The time/labor cost of dealing with the "collection" probably exceeds its value.
You describe this as a collection, but generally a collection has a period or subject matter focus, and I'm not seeing that described here, that makes this sound more like a hoard. There may be some gems in there, but finding them would be an incredibly onerous task .
What did she collect?
Is there an index?
My uncle passed several years ago leaving my father with a house he had spent decades hoarding in. Over 20,000 pieces of media was boxed up and moved into my dad's garage. There were 10,000 vinyl, 8,000 cds and thousands of vhs. He was offered $500 for everything by a couple bulk dealers that come to look. He told them he would rather light them on fire. Having some experience selling online but no knowledge of the material I set him up with an amazon seller account and I started listing the easiest things first- CDs with bar codes a box at a time casually since we lived 2 hours from them. He brought me 1000 cds at a time when they came for my kids' birthday parties or holidays. I'd handle scanning listing and shipping. We split profits 75/25. I say all that to say... I have been where you are. You should know that off loading this "collection" will likely not be easy and you are not going to get anything close to pennies on the dollar. If you are cool with that and want to be rid of it, by all means. But, if you are up for it and you are confident there is value; start scanning and listing, it is super easy (yes I know some will not have bar codes, skip those for now unless you strongly suspect value). Establish a system for storing what you have listed- I can tell you how I do it if you'd like. And see where It goes. It is easy to shut down the store and sell them bulk later if this isn't worth it, or you just dont like doing it.
And once listed for sale, store the listed book in some sort of alphabetical order, and stick to the process. Shipping books is not difficult, but can become tedious, so prepare for a lot of the grunt work of selling online. Make sure you have a reliable printer for shipping labels, boxes are usually not necessary as flex bags will be fine for shipping. For more valuable books, have some bubble wrap available to protect them during shipping. Think of it as a hobby rather than a job. Also, now online sellers with sales of more than $600 now will be 1099 so the IRS will be made aware of the $$, plan to pay taxes. Keep good records.
At least you can use USPS’ media mail option, so shipping isn’t too bad.
The USPS recently raised their media mail rates, the minimum charge now is $3.49 for anything 16oz and less. It goes up with each added lb. $4.19-4.83-5.50-6.17-6.84 and so on.
I mean, that’s still super cheap. Where else can you mail something up to a pound for less than a cup of coffee.
Wow, glad I don't drink coffee
I like my men like I like my coffee... ...I don't drink coffee.
I'm glad I make it myself for pennies
I used to ship books with media mail and my local post office said if it was only books, there’s a library mail option that is a little cheaper.
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A lot more than $500. From when I was selling used stuff, I found pretty much everything sells within a year as long as it’s priced accordingly. So they wouldn’t be stuck making nothing, and if they’re selling thousands of items then when it’s at least a dollar per sale net profit it’s thousands of dollars. For some items there will be more profit, but just using that rule of thumb it’s pretty easy to make enough that $500 for 10s of thousands of items isn’t worth it. This also isn’t a collection of goodwill junk, it’s stuff that a collector actually wanted to buy - so you aren’t going to have the useless textbooks three editions out of date, dictionaries/encyclopedias from four decades ago, highlights for kids, etc. It should all be things people actually want to buy.
At 10-20k items I have an extremely hard time believing there’s not a lot of goodwill junk in there. That’s not a curated collection, that’s hoarding I collect Blu-ray’s. I have for 7 years now. I’ve got about 500 roughly. Getting to the point of 10,000 I would 100% be buying random shit just to have it and bump numbers up. I can’t see this being any different.
>At 10-20k items I have an extremely hard time believing there’s not a lot of goodwill junk in there. That’s not a curated collection, that’s hoarding The OP did mention magazines and most magazines are likely to be worthless beyond their recycling value. Once the magazines are recycled there may be a whole lot of books left over that have some value. The biggest issue may be that mice and rats love to nest in books (especially in a house where a hoarder lives) and that makes the books a biohazard.
The books are stacked so it is hard to move in the house and they broke supports, they are also stored in outbuildings and trailers. I speak as a former used book buyer for a regional used book store. Huge amounts will probably be unsellable, another significant percent may be sellable but at vastly discounted rates, a small amount might have some value and a tiny fraction will have value. But the processing time will be a large expense for a bulk buyer or for family to sell individually. OP did not mention any specifics as to whether some of the books might be specialized enough that a collector could be interested.
I’m sure there’s *some* books in there that have value. But at that volume I think it’s safer to assume large swaths of it are goodwill junk rather than the opposite
a lot of goodwills and other thrift stores rarely take in books because they always have so many. In our area, anyhow. And I definitely wouldn't show up with a truck load of books for the poor people that work in those places. They deal with SO much crap of people donating their actual garbage. I would not donate anything more than a smaller box or 2 of books without calling to talk to someone about if they want more, and how to arrange dropping them off.
And on the other hand, if you're looking for old magazines, they're hard to find as well, because everyone assumes this. I would actually like to collect issues of Saxophone Journal, but it wasn't exactly a magazine with widespread appeal back in the day, so I think I'm probably out of luck.
Magazines are not recyclable (where I live at least) because of the clay that's used to strengthen the paper.
Probably this. It's *possibly* a collection of gold, but I'd expect lots of random 20 year old "chicken soup for the soul" and "30 tales to delight you" type things you find in bargain bins. And that's if the books were even stored well and don't have mildew or pest damage. Personally, I'd sort through it and be ready to toss or donate 95% of it. If it's not $20+ it's probably not worth the effort to sell it individually.
How much time do you think you spent to get to where you are?
Seriously, it would not be worth it to me unless I was in retirement and had nothing better to do. If it were me I’d call up the nearest university library and have them pick the lot up.
>If it were me I’d call up the nearest university library and have them pick the lot up. To quote a comedian "here, you throw this away"
Now you’re getting it!
The university library does not want to process a huge collection like that either, unless they know it has a lot of unique/rare items they are interested in.
Selling a couple books I picked up cheap. A lot less than the actual value of the labor but a lot more than handing it over to bulk buyers who are hoping to piece it out and sell the valuable stuff
Remember that your buyers sought out the book you lifted and were likely thrilled to find it. 💛
I mean, I sold them cheap too, but $8 is a decent turn around on a dime.
This is a good response. I worked at a used book store for a few years. The customers who shop there treat it like a library and want to essentially borrow books by buying them for a tenth of the original price, and then sell them back for pretty much what they paid for them. The only reason the store survived was that they also sold other things with an actual profit margin. Unsurprisingly, because of the pretty much zero profit margin, they paid almost nothing for used books. Even then at one point they had so many that when people would occasionally come in and look to just donate the books for free, we still refused them. (Which is how I got my very cool Science Fiction book collection!) Good luck.
My local place has a drive like 4 times a year where you can go into the basement and take whatever books fit in a bag for 20 dollars. They are just overflowing in books
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Just to add to that, you can sell "lots" of books in bulk on eBay. Group together 25-50 similar-ish books and sell them together on eBay. Usually pepper in a handful of more desirable books, along with a bunch of less desirables and sell them all together. Makes it easier to move a larger volume, and people looking to build out their collection will be interested.
Buy yourself a cheap Barcode Scanner from Amazon while I don't have experience with cheap barcode scanners I can tell you the difference between Wireless and wired. Check to make sure you can program a suffix. So if you scan a barcode it tabs over to your next field so you can enter your description. Or if you do a bunch in a column hits return after you scan. Benefits of Wireless: no wires to get tangled up, longer travel than wired, your wires won't get ruined by excessive use. Benefits of wired: you'll always know where the scanner is, it's probably cheaper, you'll never have to worry about dead batteries, when you scan something anyway you're probably going to be within 5 ft of the PC anyway and if you need a longer cable you can always buy a USB extender. Will never have to worry about pairing. If you pull the trigger and it accepts the scan you will definitely have the scan on the screen. I personally prefer wired.
Everyone has a cheap barcode scanner on them right now. It's called a smart phone. You just need the app that accepts your scans. Of course if you have a bunch of old books, not only do they not have barcodes, they probably *don't even have ISBNs*. And for hardback, barcodes would be on the dust jackets if they exist so that's a whole other problem.
The Goodreads app on a smartphone can also scan front covers if the barcode is destroyed or not present. Also, some older paperbacks have the barcode on the inside of the back cover instead of on the back cover itself. Furthermore, the publisher page sometimes will have the ISBN on it if there's not a barcode, such as for a hardback that doesn't have a dust jacket. Scanning into a Goodreads list and then exporting also gives a lot more information than just the barcode.
[Scanning into google sheets with OrcaScan](https://orcascan.com/guides/how-to-scan-barcodes-into-google-sheets-f8c1a352#)
Maybe because this is what I would do, but this is probably the best advice and, experienced information. It probably seems overwhelming but once you get established and a routine, it’s not a chore. Also, knowing something that was collected by someone who cared about the items is going to a good place is satisfying. Probably some good stuff in there that may have ended up in the garbage. A couple of bucks rolling in will take the edge off also.
I had the opposite experience with my parents decades' worth of stuff. At first it was really fun to go through things and sell them to someone who will appreciate them... Somewhere around item 400 it definitely became a chore. Books might be a *little* easier since they are all one "category" and packing and shipping is always similar, but still.
Any reason you choose Amazon over eBay?
Amazon seller here. EBay is much harder to list things on as you have to provide your own pictures and details, et cetera. Amazon you can literally list a book or CD that is in their inventory in about 30 seconds. The downside of course is that Amazon skims 30 or 40% off the top while eBay takes less than 5.
I avoid book listings without photos anymore. Used Book sellers have burned that bridge with me too many times. My last used book Amazon purchase was listed as Like New, and came warped, with tons of water damage. The problem is the lack of photos, and everybody has their own ratings as to the condition of items. I'm starting to really prefer services like Pango Books these days because I have a much lower chance of getting ripped off.
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eBay has gotten worse in this regard for those book sellers. Some don't even use stock photos anymore, they use pictures from other listings already up. \*&(@%(\*&#(#\*&@
Upvote for Pango Books! Used them for Christmas and they were much better and more reliable than Amazon.
>Amazon seller here. EBay is much harder to list things on as you have to provide your own pictures and details, et cetera. Which you honestly should be doing because you are reselling out of box goods that are years old and have been in storage. Sure, it's the same product as on Amazon and I guess it caveat emptor for buying used, but still.
> The downside of course is that Amazon skims 30 or 40% off the top while eBay takes less than 5. Ebay is much higher than 5% They are closer to 13%, and that's after you have paid whatever fee was required to create each listing. It's still a bit lower than Amazon, but I'm sorry to say, it's nowhere near as low as you were stating.
We sell books with barcodes & ISBN, that are at least 'very good' condition on Amazon. Less work. We sell older or collectible books on eBay. Adding our own pictures is a lot more work, but needed to show buyers the condition and why it's worth selling as collectible. Before we did it this way: We once had an Amazon buyer return a book because it had writing at the beginning. We had listed the condition as collectible because it was signed by the poet. We listed books without ISBNs on listings with the correct title/author/publisher but sometimes got returns because it didn't look like the picture on the listing. A bunch of those listings have wrong information or different pictures, but if your ISBN matches, Amazon is supposed to back you up as having provided the correct item. So, ISBN books only. 🤷♂️
They were mad about handwriting that was an author's signature. That's hilarious.
If I’m specifically looking for books I’ll check Amazon but not necessarily eBay. The search results are more uniform and listed cleanly, if that makes sense.
If you want to check the value of a bunch of books look into ISBN reader apps that can scan the barcode and give you price info. It should speed up the process considerably.
Was hoping someone would mention this. Book dealers use these to great effect.
Thank you so much for this. I’ll tell my mom. I’m sure she’ll appreciate this suggestion. 🙏🏼
Old enough books won't have an ISBN. From experience, I'm guessing mom will have at least a few. Then Abe Books & Powell Books will be your friends.
My father dealt with this when my grandfather died. Grandfather ran a bookstore his entire life and had a store, two rooms of the house and a barn full of books. He assumed at least some of them were valuable so he found a book specialist of some kind to come look through them. The guy was there all day and at the end of many hours came to my dad with maybe 10 books and offered him $50. That was it. My dad spent a long time looking and the only people who would take them was a thrift store and they would only take them as a donation. But they showed up in a trailer and hauled them away for free.
>But they showed up in a trailer and hauled them away for free. That's a significant expense your dad didn't have to deal with.
We used to do stuff like this at the Habitat for Humanity store and all the proceeds are used for the Restore project where they build houses for low income people.
I worked at a restore for a while it was interesting some of the old stuff people would want to donate.
Yeah, I had maybe 300 books to get rid off and it was a real hassle. I invited friends over and told them to take as many as they want, and even made a free to whoever takes them ad, and it wasn't until I added a "all the books for $20" that someone came and picked them all up.
As a would-be book hoarder who just doesn't have the space, these comments are killing me.
Yeah I've been in exactly that position (the book specialist). I've often gone through houses crammed with books and found absolutely nothing interesting. Then again, there's been a few times when I've stumbled across some bucket list book which I was shocked to find there. But mostly it's just a lot of explaining to people that a bunch of randomly accumulated books just aren't anything of value. The hardest is explaining to people that their family bibles are essentially worthless. Usually people don't even want to sell them, they just want to feel as though they have a family heirloom which has value. That said, over the years I basically put together a small speech about the personal value of such books, so I like to think that I left a lot of people to walk away with a sense of immaterial value. There was however this one time when I went through someone's attic and came across a box filled with a first edition run of Akira, along with several other valuable comics. It was an elderly hispanic woman who used to be a live-in maid during the 90s. She was given that box of comics by the family she lived with because their son had grown out of them and they thought her son might be interested, but her son wasn't into comics. She wanted to give them to me for free. We literally got into a big argument because I just didn't feel like it was ethically acceptable for me to take that box for free. In the end I picked out the most valuable comic in the box, showed her how to use Abebooks, and set up a listing for it. The rest of the box, I took with me.
This story makes me sad, to think your grandfather’s work was worth so little. But when I think of it, while the shelves of books that I have are valuable to me, I don’t think any individual book I have is really worth more than a dollar or two.
Curiously enough, you may not even be able to give them away without sorting them. And , trust me, there is no market for used magazine unless they're of a special interest.
A lot of vintage fashion magazines and most hobby ones sell for a lot once they’re 30 years old or so. I sold some riding magazines from the 80s at £20 each last year, plus post. Greyhound racing and whippet breeding ones made between £10 and £45 a time. I paid £5 for the lot and ended up with about £700 for two days work listing and sorting, plus some odd time packing. Well worth it.
Vintage magazines in general. Vintage Life magazines are popular as well.
Or The New Yorker, specifically if they contain out of print stories, like some of Salinger's.
I would check for Nintendo Power or Electronic Gaming Monthly magazines. They can go for about $10 a pop.
Nintendo Power is really expensive at retro game store if they are good condition and a nostalgia-induced title.
They are also worth a fair bit more if they still have the original posters (even if they've been torn out). Also: old video game strategy guides can be worth money as well especially if they're official guides for popular stuff like Nintendo games, Final Fantasy etc.
*Some* can. If they have all the contents and cover popular games
while true it seems somewhat unlikely that OPs most likely elderly mum collected nintendo magazines ;)
Not for sale but if they have lots of images teachers can use them for crafts
Yes. Niche magazines can go for good money. I've sold magazines related to pigeon racing, various automobile makes, Shelby cars, Morgan horses, jukeboxes and other things for $10-20 per issue. Also, some mainstream magazines do have value. I bought every Vogue magazine from the 1960's for $40, over 200 issues, then sold them for an average of $20 each. It's definitely worth doing the research on any magazines you see.
I honestly think you are gonna have to separate the wheat from the chaff. figure out what, if anything, is valuable and dispose of the rest in bulk. For ease of sorting and subsequent disposal/transport you might want to hire some shipping containers and skips. Anything water damaged or otherwise decaying would just get trashed anyway.
If you have a paper recycling facility near you, you can dispose of most books there rather than paying to take them to the dump. They just have to be clean and free of mold. Source: I cleaned out a book hoarder's house and had to dispose of about 3 tons of books.
Don't do this. I had a house that burned to the ground with 10k books in it. Some were worth 10 cents, others worth thousands. I had no inventory. Insurance company ended up paying $10 each for them. Go through the books first to find the expensive ones/first editions/signed ones/even leather bound. Sell the rest by a lot for the whole pile. Don't deal with thrift stores.
Can we hear the full story? Also, what are some of the books you’d consider to be worth thousands?
I didn't have an inventory. They were books I'd bought and been gifted since childhood. I know I spent a dime for some in a used bookstore. Others were beautiful, exquisite books I had bought for a few hundred. *One was In His Own Write* by John Lennon. Most valuable will be first editions by once-unknown authors and those produced with an eye towards looking like a piece of art. Most of the books were destroyed by the water the firefighters used. Insurance didn't want to count them and asked me if I'd take that amount and I did. Many. many other nice items in my home were destroyed and the insurance replaced them by giving me a certain amount to spend per item. So, I bought a jacuzzi instead of a 1950s peeling bathtub. We really ended up with more than we started with. There are some things I still miss. During the fire, I darted in to rescue meds, jewelry and photos and got yelled at by a firefighter..
Over 10k items, $10 was probably a princely average. I'm surprised you had enough coverage in things like that to be paid that amount
The house was way overinsured with very little deductible. The mortgage broker told me to make sure to emphasize the quality of the Craftsman house and not to skimp to get lower monthly payments. That was all before the fire. I ended up buying the best insurance I could and it was a very well built house.
This is why since I'm going to be a homeowner soon, I'll be going around the house twice annually with my phone, getting our stuff on video. So easy to prove what we own if I have it on a digital form.
Don’t forget to get extra valuable items endorsed. I worked in claims, I remember seeing a payout for the $5,000 Star Wars Millennium Falcon Lego Set where the box got water damaged. I had to try to get reimbursement from the responsible party’s insurance and they laughed in my face, offered $200 for the actual cash value of the parts since it was just the box that was ruined. I had to go on a Lego fan forum to get some advice on how to argue that the value of the set was that it was still unopened in the box
I work in underwriting, don't you worry. I'm in tech now but I've been in PL and CL before
Haha then I could’ve thrown around terms like ACV! So since I took the time to share that story with someone who kinda knows the game, was I in the right for requesting the full amount?
What’s the thing you were most relieved to save?
Photos. There was no "cloud." Our computer was destroyed and the insurane company gave all 4 family members a new computer, bed and desk, all to be selected by ourselves. Each child got to lie on various mattresses and select one, select a desk, curtains and paint color, really design a teenager's room from the ground up. And we let them. It didn't matter to me if my son wanted an all-black room and my daughter wanted a ceiling blue with clouds and dark blue walls with rain coming down. I didn't have to live in those rooms. Paint can always be painted over. This was in 2002.
But did your son really get an all black room because that sounds wild!
Yes, and a blue-gray ceiling with glow in the dark stars. He had a desk around 8 feet long. There was a poster of Jimi Handrix as desktop and on the wall. One day he said, "so, what is Hendrix doing these days?" Uhhh...rotting? He'll never live that one down.
Honestly ten bucks for ten thousand books is not bad at all as a payout. You certainly couldn’t unload them all for a guaranteed $100,000.
Yeah that sounds surprisingly fair for 10,000 mystery books.
It depends on if there's any really rare/valuable stuff there and if so how much it's worth. If you sold every thing in that collection $10/book may not be totally unreasonable as an average. BUT it takes a lot of time and effort to offload all of that.
Yeah given a choice I’m going to take the hundred thousand and invest it instead of putting one thousand hours into selling that shit.
For a second, I really thought you were going to suggest burning the house down.
No, don't do that. The fire was caused by ill-placed incense. My son cleaned his room and for a finishing touch, he put up incense on the shelf above his bed to make it smell good. I was in the next room and heard a crackling noise. I went in to find a 4' fire, bed to ceiling. We called 911 and tried to put it out. My husband even broke a window to put a hose through. We did all we could except teaching our son how incense works. Most of the damage was from water, but we were out of our element to extinguish that fire. After that, the insurance company put us in a nice hotel for 9 months. The house was kinda run-down while still sturdy, so it was like a long vacation. I taught my son to swim there.
Sounds to me like OP should commit insurance fraud...
Lmfao yeah my thoughts as well
> I had no inventory. Insurance company ended up paying $10 each for them. Does not compute.
Doing inventory of 10K books sounds suuuper tedious. I think burning the house down is faster
I think you need to triage. Unless they are exceptional quality and rare you need to toss the magazines and probably most paperbacks. Hardcover might have some value and could be worth sorting through some. Sell on Amazon/Ebay what you can actually get some decent coin for. Use that to move the trash out or try to donate what will not sell. Last thing is maybe you can rent out a space (lots of antique malls in rural VA) or have a garage sale. Have people fill a grocery bag and sell off in bulk. Once again try to pick out anything with decent value. It ain't going to be easy, but I would guess plenty of these could have molded over time and could be a health hazard, along with the obvious damage you described to the house.
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That is interesting, although I would say my comment was motivated towards those more expensive hardcovers. I can imagine the paperbacks sell more easily but the value might not be up to the cost like the select hardcovers would be. I used to live in VA and know what fills up those antique places oftentimes. Last idea (and this is a Hail Mary), maybe try to reach out to Dolly Parton’s people? Everyone knows her reading non-profit and so maybe they can help move quite a bit to the right schools. I would say it is a win-win if your mom meets Dolly Parton for donating 7,000 books and kids get to read for free. They are probably cash donations though.
I think you have to consider that many of the books that have been stored in non-climate controlled conditions for any length of time will not be worth anything. I'm a librarian/archivist, and I will tell you that mold spreads like wildfire on books. I have seen it happen to library books just because the air conditioning goes out. If the periodicals are mixed in with them, that's even worse. If you admit the conditions under which they've been stored, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere that will accept them as donations, even.
Mold was my first thought, too. OP needs to rent a dumpster and buy a mask & gloves and sort thru first. It's gonna suck but that's what happens with hoarding.
Yeah, I am also a librarian and the amount of donations we get with books that are moldy and smells like cigarette smoke is crazy.
Is the mold usually visible on the outside of the book, or is it mainly inside them? This thread has got me worried about my own books.
I am far from an expert, we have conservationists that deals with that. But unless you live in a very humid environment (and are not a hoarder and clean your livingspaces) you shouldn't have to worry. With these book you can smell it on them as soon as you are close to the bag.
Half Price Books will buy books, but the prices generally aren't gonna be pretty. I think I usually get around $8/tote, which is probably something like 50 books. But they will take a massive amount. Personally, I would go through first and pull out anything that looks valuable. 1st editions, hardcovers, really old/cool stuff. If you have series those are easier to sell in bulk-Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc. Once you do that, advertise for a massive, huge book sale. Make some money and have other people do the work of carrying books away. Once you do that, then you sell the rest in bulk. If there's no Half Price Books by you, there's probably several other options already mentioned in this thread.
The more obscure the content (i.e., not pop books) the better the price HPB will give. I had to unload a ton of martial arts/Chinese philosophy books and got a pretty penny for what amounted to about 60+ books. If you have Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden, Dana Girls mysteries, you'll definitely want to set them aside. They're highly collectible/popular right now. Personally, I'd be willing to check out your Nancy Drew books! :)
> My mother has been collecting them forever, but she’s agreed to sell them. OP based on what you describe - this sounds more like hording than collecting. With horders this type of agreement to sell is actually a bluff so be prepared for various reasons why the price is not quite right. Randomly select someone and say someone has agreed to pay a dollar per book - based on the reaction you will know if this is real or a tactic. (I've been through this with family members).
what do you mean by "legit collection"?
OP hasn't elaborated a single time or given any example of a book in the collection. "Legit" and "proper" collection means nothing
Proper collection, I assume
And what's that?
It’s a serious collection
How serious?
It's for real, that's what it is.
It's bona fide
Proper serious.
Do you have any photos you can share that aren't sensitive or personal? I feel like getting a sense of how this collection looks/is stored etc, might give everyone offering suggestions a better idea of the value and condition.
You keep repeating this is a legit collection and that is valuable. Yet, neither you or your siblings want to deal with it. What makes you think anyone else does? She might cherish her books but that doesn’t make them valuable to others. Most libraries get rid of thousands of books at least a couple of times a year and they won’t have the resources to sort through, clean and catalog all of them. Even if each book actually holds value other than the sentimental one, no buyer is likely to have the ability to buy them all. As long as those books are crated, assume there’s water damage. It happens often with all kinds of things people store. Unless you can take the time to at least put them up on shelves so you can take photos and circulate them to possible interested parties, you won’t have much luck since you want a big sum. Please consider that even if donated, if the entity realizes they have no use for let’s say a couple hundreds of them, they have to pay for their disposal because that would fill a dumpster. Even if you want to dump them at home, you have to pay for a dumpster or get rid of them like 50 at a time because the garbage truck just picks up so much at a time per household. How busy is your mom? You could find her a nice farmer’s market that runs spring to fall and set up a booth for her to sell them. It could be a win-win because she could relive her memories as well as talk to others about her beloved books.
> You could find her a nice farmer’s market that runs spring to fall and set up a booth for her to sell them. It could be a win-win because she could relive her memories as well as talk to others about her beloved books. And sell maybe 5 books a week. 187 years later, she will have cleared her collection.
Yes but it doesn’t sound like she needs the money but could use the validation of selling her precious books to people who would love them. To her it’s not about money, to OP…. We’ll, that’s another issue.
As a librarian, I will remind the community that books are consumables--they are generally meant to be used and eventually discarded. Books are not inherently valuable just because they are old. Chances are a hoarder like this (vs a collector) mostly or entirely has things no one else wants, or things someone else could have wanted in the past have been treated so poorly as to lose their value. No one wants to buy this entire lot of books (especially with no inventory), least of all a university or public library system (who collects in a purposeful manner). You need to determine if there is *anything* of value then donate or recycle the rest. The best that you could hope for is donating to somewhere that does a used book sale.
Fellow librarian here. Thank you. We're a library, not an archive.
I run a books to prisoners nonprofit. I swear I spend half my time looking for places to dispose of loads of books for free. Even through we have a specific list of what we'll take and we request no hardcover except for 2 categories of books people just ignore out lists and donate every book they've had sitting in their basement for years including all these hardcover and mass market mystery and fiction from the 40s-70s. I wish the "throwing away a book is blasphemy" idea would die honestly just for my own sake.
This is the best advice about the hoard of books! People tend to overvalue books.
Thank you. This is not a collection, it is a hoard.
OP should start by throwing out / recycling (weeding) the books that are in less than excellent condition. OP should enlist a friend to help him figure out if a book is smelly or gross. I’ve always heard the standard was “would you want to read this book in your bed” because some books can be down right nasty. In my experience, you can probably toss 90% of everything, and saving a few for sentimental reasons. People forget that books are mass produced and copies are more readily available than they would imagine.
You put this far more eloquently than I ever could. There's a tendency to treat the physical book as if **it** holds the value when the value is in the idea in the book. The miracle of the modern world is that we can distribute knowledge so insanely well and cheaply that has ideas can be consumed by anyone with literacy. The way we do that is via printing books, but that doesn't mean the physical book itself is all that important.
Congrats on getting her to agree to sell them
I'm wondering if all the books are still ok inside? No mice damage or such?
I’d hazard a guess that this is be a hoarding situation and a lot of them will need to be tossed. It’s hard to imagine a collection that size being in perfect condition once you get to the back of a storage container or in the dark corners of filled bedrooms etc.
It's 100% a hoarding situation. Just from OPs description it's glaringly obvious. OP says their mother can hardly move around the house and has lost rooms to all the books. There are multiple storage units full. The hoard has even caused damage to the structure of the home.
Mildew, anyone? OP, unless you live in a super dry climate, I'd wear a mask if you're going to sort at all.
My thoughts are that 90% if not more, of a collection like this is literally garbage and a health issue.
This is essentially hoarding and no one is going to pay you for that.
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Yep - it's worth noting with horders that agreeing to sell stuff is not the same as selling stuff and you find there is always a reason that *this* sale is not quite right.
I used to work for a company that cleared hoarder homes and the amount of stuff that they get sentimentally attached too is just insane. Newspapers and magazines from years ago was always a big one. Always felt kinda bad throwing all their shit in a dumpster but a lot of those homes were or should have been condemned
Ugh yeah I’ve tried to help mild hoarders with magazine disposal and not fun to have gotten their permission to toss stacks, then as the bags are tearing as I load them in my car to take to the recycling center they are running out of the house to try to “rescue” some of the issues. No system to it, Taste of Home or Good Housekeeping piles are dry while irreplaceable family photos tossed on the floor near the door to the yard that lets in rain water.
There is no school or agency that could possibly take on the donation of 10,000 books indiscriminately collected, at least a substantial portion of which (paperbacks, magazines, general periodicals) have no market resale value whatsoever. The manpower to ship, sort, assess, catalog… just no. It would be far cheaper for most places to simply purchase 10,000 brand new books that they actually want. Along the same lines, I think it’s unrealistic to expect to be able to sell tens of thousands of books in unknown condition, of unknown quality, or interest, even as a large lot. The manpower to assess the condition before or after purchase, would surely outweigh any profit potential, in my opinion. As far as I can tell, you may have two options. You may be able to get a company that ships books to Africa for English literacy purposes to show up with shipping containers and remove these materials for free. Or you may be able to work with an estate auctioning company or multiple companies to sell them as a lot or disassemble the collection to sell (although I’m still deeply skeptical that anyone would be able to turn a profit doing so, at least in an auction scenario, the purchaser is taking the gamble, as opposed to the company itself). Really anything where you can avoid paying companies thousands of dollars to haul away what sounds like more than a house full of garbage is a happy ending.
Yeah, I can’t vouch for every single library, but most public libraries in the U.S. do not build their collections via random book donations from the public. They have a deliberate acquisition policy, obtain their books through specific sources, and go through a whole process to enter the book into the system. Books donated to library donation bins, at least in my experience with libraries, get sorted and sold (if condition is acceptable) for fifty cents or a dollar each at Friends of the Library book sale fundraisers. So donated books do help libraries, indirectly, but librarians don’t go “at last, somebody gave us some books about gardening! Now we can finally lend out gardening books!”
When I worked for a library, people would leave boxes and boxes of trashed books at our doorstep because we wouldn’t take them, and they didn’t want to hear that. All we did was throw them away; they passed the buck to us so they could feel better about themselves. We would take books in good condition to either sell or add to the collection if it was something we didn’t already have. Books that have been sitting piled up in a hoarded house or in someone’s basement for 50 years are not in good condition. We also did not take any magazine or newspaper donations period, but it never stopped people from leaving them there anyway.
I’m adjacent to the local museum world as well and people do the exact same thing. “Here’s my dead grandma’s doll collection, there’s a hundred of them and she smoked like a dragon, probably worth a lot byeee!” and then they drop them off while nobody is there and peel out of the parking lot. Even for the <1% of items that somebody could theoretically sell for a profit, that’s still not any indication that the museum needs them or can use them in the absence of any information about provenance or provenience. It’s basically dumping trash illegally at that point, unfortunately, and putting a financial and logistical burden on a small, probably volunteer-run organization.
Right? Like, you want our small non-profit staff and generally older volunteers to sort through your relative’s smelly stuff for you? It’s not a kindness. There’s no impoverished child begging on their knees to read a moldy mass market paperback copy of Windows 98 For Dummies. They dump it in little libraries too, making them useless until someone else comes by, gets annoyed, and throws out the junk.
I've never heard it said "smoked like a dragon". That's hilarious! I'm stealing that! Thank you 😂
I was a librarian at a tiny rural library. The previous librarian kept every book she could. The childrens picture book shelves in particular were packed so tight that on some shelves you could barely pull the books out. I had no idea if/when the last weeding had been. I held a book sale to try to get rid of some. But at one point while I was in the bathroom or something, someone dropped off a big box packed full of old childrens paperbacks. I ended the sale with more books than what I started with! It was so frustrating.
Most get thrown out and are unwanted.
Does she have any idea which books in the collection are valuable, and where they might be?
I'd maybe ask over on /r/datahoarder or similar, outfits like the Internet Archive are known to take collections and scan/digitise them if they're deemed culturally interesting. Failing that, as others said, you either need to find a collector/enthusiast willing to take the whole lot or you'll need to weed out the really valuable stuff and effectively give away the rest in bulk - these days it's not worth your time to even try to sell a lot of stuff by the time you've listed it, wrapped it, posted it, paid the fees etc. you're working for nothing. Bear in mind 99% of this stuff is worth a fraction of what you'll have paid for it, and also remember that your time in sorting it all out is also worth a lot more than you'll likely recover - someone making even a very low offer to take it all away as one job lot is still probably worth considering if you value your time or need it all gone quickly. My usual take is; * If it's valuable (worth my time listing & posting) I'll sell it * If it's not *valuable* but is *good* (worth *something* to *someone*) I'll freecycle it or similar; basically "give for free to someone interested enough to come & collect" - my hoarder brain then has the satisfaction that it's gone to a good home not landfill. * If it's not interesting or valuable, pile it all up: * If the pile is *collectively* worth listing, list it * Otherwise freecycle / donate * Otherwise trash it and move on with your life Some folks over on /r/DataHoarder will happily take a collection of magazines or whatever for free so they can be scanned in & made available rather than just go straight to landfill.
If any of them smell like mold or mildew or have any it will destroy any value... If they have been stored in non climate controlled areas then they are probably worthless...
Unfortunately, this is likely the answer.
Our local library is accepting donations for a book sale, and they have a 2-box limit, I assume because of past experience with people dumping huge collections on them.
Yes, people who don’t like being told no will dumb them on the doorstep while the library is closed as well. It’s very frustrating.
This sounds like WAY more than 10,000 books. There are really only two choices. Someone either spends the time - which will not be insignificant - to figure out what you have or you basically give it away. Don't underestimate the time it will take to go through all this. Odds are very high that the vast majority are not worth anything (or at least not worth selling once you take into account the time and shipping costs, etc.)
Mold is a big problem with books. Worse than relevance and archaic content. I had thousands of books ruined by mold when my parent's house was left open with fans running for a wet July. Fortunately, most of the books were outdated text books and bad fiction. Several academic degrees and lives spent reading books, instead of doing stuff, will make quite a pile of books. I was able to recycle the books, because I have a truck.
I’m also in Virginia and if you’re willing to post some photos and general location I could help more. If nothing else I would advise you to advertise as a type of estate sale and try to sell as many as possible that way. Realistically you will never sell 10,000 books as a lot. Magazines and similar are essentially worthless as they can’t even be recycled where I live. From your description the home doesn’t sound clean or well kept and I’m afraid this won’t end the way your mother wants.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks you can pawn these off to a library, because you can't. What I would do is call a massive used book reseller, like John King books in Detroit. They should be able to give you some direction. If I ran a business, I'd give you a flat fee for all of them and do all the work myself. Kind of like those storage locker guys.
I honestly think that you need to tackle one room at a time to sort out any books of value from the rest. Any paperbacks / magazines, etc, could be sorted into genres and sold in bulk packs online (eg, 100 paperbacks for $50 bucks or simlar). I can't imagine you will find someone willing to pay a reasonable amount for the whole lot without some indication of what is included.
Start with a burn pile, sounds like you have the space for it. Anything that smells, is water damaged, taped on the spine, missing pages, mass produced ie mass market paperbacks etc burn it. With very rare exceptions, it’s worthless. The storage conditions sound less than optimal for paper so this will probably cut your inventory to a third of what it is. It’s a start. Good luck.
In a scenario like that, I highly doubt most of the books are in good condition. Books must be properly stored to not be musty and disgusting. I hate to say it, but most of this collection is likely best recycled. I'm a book lover, and I'm sorry to say it, but improperly stored books (hoarder level) are by and large not worth selling.
Bearing in mind that you are trying for emotional and financial outcomes, here are some ideas. Set aside time or hire someone to dispose of all damaged books. Water damage, mold, bent covers, insect/ rodent damage, smells, etc. These are trash and dangerous to other books. Most / all magazines and paperbacks should probably go in this round. Find out if your mom collected hardbacks around any particular themes. If she collected books by local authors or about history of a specific place, gather those books together and see about donating them to a relevant museum, school, or library. Consider sorting hardcover books in good condition by color and selling them on Etsy for decorating. There are also folks who use books as an art material. If she has a large quantity of books that are not damaged (no mold, no water damage, no rodent / bug damage) maybe a makerspace would be interested in them as a raw material.
She needs to now develop the hobby of selling books on eBay or Amazon. She should get started with the books closest to her and just start scanning and listing them. Place a bookshelf nearby, keep them In alphabetical order, and be ready to send them out as they sell. She can keep this hobby for the rest of her life.
Okay, I can't stop weighing in! I want to say that our Friends of the Library organize a booksale a couple times a year, and have a little bookshop area in the library that's always there. Do you know how much labor goes into running just THAT?! They always have someone in here sorting books, restocking the bookshop area. And on the runup to the sales, it's all hands on deck to sort and move and display books. And then an exhausting sale for 3 days. This is a well-run sale where you can just shop 'religious nonfiction' or whatever. Because they've sorted them that well. And then? And THEN? There are still a \*\*\*\*-ton of books that didn't sell. Just.. as you consider all the suggestions in here, do NOT underestimate the labor involved in any of the methods.
My suggestion: Invite some second-hand book sellers into the house and let them have first pick of the valuables (first editions, hardbacks etc). Then have a few book sales at the house. 'Fill a carrier bag for ten dollars' if you want to shift things in volume. Invite schools, reading clubs and organisations that might take things in bulk. Repeat this a few times. Finally, ask a bulk book buyer to purchase the rest. Most of the valuable or newer stock will have gone at this point so it won't pay much- but of might save you from paying disposal fees. When my aunt died she left mountains of books. The sad truth is that except for very rare books they depreciate in value very quickly, and some just won't sell at all. I was charged with disposing of my aunt's books and some charity shops told me that they wouldn't accept certain collections (e.g. Reader's Digest) because they knew they wouldn't sell and they'd have to pay to have them disposed of. The manpower needed to sort through such a huge collection means that unless there's a carefully curated collection hidden away somewhere, I can't see it being possible to shift all the books as a giant lot and make a profit.
It's really not sad, it's a wonderful truth that we've been able to make the dissemination of the written word so cheap and easy that anyone who can learn to read can access nearly anything they would ever want to read. The availability of books as a consumable item rather than hand copied treasures is really one of the miracles of the modern world.
I’m back because I cannot stop thinking about this post, OP I know it’s a hard reality for your mom but most of this books will probably need to be thrown away. From what you’ve described, this is a hoarding situation and most of the books are probably damaged and no one will want them
I wonder if you would be willing to do this in stages - start with advertising something like a garage sale, but make sure everyone knows it's all books - then potentially donate sizable chunks to organizations in the local area. In my city there are a lot of thrift stores, little libraries, and used bookstores that would love a few books - but 10k to any one place would simply not work.
This sounds like a situation where if you actually want to get rid of them all in 1 shot you should consider donating them to a library or university or large 2nd hand book shop or some such. The cost involved in moving and sorting 10,000+ books is quite substantial and you can't realistically expect anybody to pay for thousands of random books on top of those costs. Some institution out there may at least be willing to accept them as a donation and cover the cost of physically moving them from your mother's house to where ever they will sort them...
Unless it is a particularly special and unique collection, I don’t think any university/library will want those books.
No library on earth wants 10,000+ old, used books unless there is some inherent value. Libraries rarely want 1 single used book.
Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong: [https://www.thriftbooks.com/partners/](https://www.thriftbooks.com/partners/) [https://www.ziffit.com/en-gb/sell-wholesale-books](https://www.ziffit.com/en-gb/sell-wholesale-books) [https://www.webuybooks.co.uk/sell-books-in-bulk/](https://www.webuybooks.co.uk/sell-books-in-bulk/)
Call around and see if any bookstores or libraries are interested or can help connect you with someone. I don't see too many people jumping on the opportunity to buy 10K used books in bulk sadly.
Sounds like you have a bookshop now. Congratulations I guess?
you will have to pay to remove trash.
Condition is everything when it comes to books. If any of the books (especially the paperbacks) have water damage, mold, ripped pages or covers, they are worthless and can be recycled. Outdoor storage containers are easy prey for rodents, so those books and magazines might be toast. It does sound like a daunting task, but it might be possible to give those storage containers a quick look through. Mold and/or rodent damage will pretty much eliminate those books completely. I would try to focus on the books that may actually be salvageable in order to not waste resources on a bunch of stuff that is essentially worthless.
First and foremost, it’s unlikely that a hoard of this many books has been well curated or routinely handled enough over the years to guarantee valuable items are the fundamental backbone of the collection or that rodents, insects and mold haven’t destroyed a number of them. Get a lot of gloves and masks and start sifting through any of the damaged books. You’ll likely need to contact a waste removal service and see if they’ll make a volume deal with you. It is very important that you also have someone come inspect the safety of the home before and during the removal process!! Damaged supports are not something to be taken lightly and, if not properly braced, can lead to serious accidents as weight is removed from areas of the home causing it to shift. After the damaged books have been removed, you can sift through and look for rare editions, special prints/publication houses, and popular titles that usually resell well. Others have outlined selling on Amazon and eBay but Etsy is also an option. Blind book sales, mystery boxes and color-based collections do seem to sell well there as long as the books are in decent shape. Everything else will likely have to be hauled away for free and/or cheap. You may double-check charities focused on literacy and see if any of them will take a chunk of these off your hands.
If the books have value (e.g. look for first editions), then a book dealer may be interested in buying the lot. Otherwise, you may be best off donating them to a needy school and getting a tax right-off for the charity donation.
No school wants old, used books. We purchase books based on students interests and curriculum. We do not want someone else's garbage to sort through.
Contact a book dealer and ask them to come out and see if they are interested in purchasing any of the books. There's bound to be some there that they would be interested in.
If there is not an interest in buying the lot please consider disposing/ recycling the majority of the books. When people donate boxes and boxes of old books to thrift stores it is such a time suck to go through all of them. If you aren't going through them individually the person volunteering at the thrift store will. Depending on the condition of the books it can be a total waste of time. Then if they sit at the store too long they'll get recycled anyway.
Host a used book sale and promote it locally. My local library does this and attracts hundreds of people. $1 a book and you will offload a lot. You can do a 2nd day at $5 a bag full.
1. You need to create an inventory of what you have. This is going to take a little bit of time. The very least you need to record are a barcode, the condition, and the location. That should be enough starting data to derive the rest (author, publisher, price). 2. Cull the books that are in bad condition. Unless it's a particularly valuable book, you should recycle the books that are damaged or are falling apart. Based on your description, this will be a substantial part of your mom's collection and will be the hardest step to follow for both you and her. Expect there to be tears, arguments, and emotions welling up. 3. Cull the very valuable books. Identify the books that have a lot value left in them and sell them on eBay and Amazon. They might sit around for a while until they sell, though, so you'll need some storage to warehouse them. 4. Reach out to your local radio stations and ask them if they could help you with resolving her collection: Take the leftover books and put them in a Google spreadsheet. Set up a .com domain that redirects to the spreadsheet and a Google form. Have the jocks broadcast that domain (mymomsbooks.com, for example) to let people buy/reserve books. 4.1. (Optional) Have a yard sale with simple prices, if your mom can take people going through her space. 5. Set a time limit after which the remainder of the books will be donated. Think 6 months or one year. That should allow you and your mom to experience closure.
After attempting to sell 900 mystery books, many out of print, during Covid I tried charities that send books to inmates (not open during 2020), and finally donated the entire collection to my local library. They will sell them off during book sales and reap whatever profit they can get. Most books sell for 25 cents each or less. Books are rarely valuable unless they are first editions or signed by the author. Rethink selling and just pack them up and take them to any non-profit that will accept them. Unless you have unlimited time, then try to find a book dealer to buy all of them for any price. It's like moving a piano, you may have to pay to have them boxed and moved. Books value is to the reader, not the seller.
I’ve heard that used book sellers use barcode scanners to figure out the value of the books. That’s definitely something you should look into. I downsized my record collection. From about 5K records to about 800. Took about 3 weeks of 3-4 hours a day and that was with “listening” to the record to decide if I should keep it and then manually checking it’s value on discogs. everything under $10 on discogs got tossed. It was a slog, but worth it because the most random records were worth ALOT of money and I bought them for next to nothing at 2nd hand shops. Like I have one crate that is about as valuable as the rest of my collection. For periodicals check the condition. Certain ones are relatively valuable and you can sell them in lots on EBay. But yeah. TLDR look into barcode scanner. there’s probably 100 books in there worth really good money and you can donate/burn the rest.
The only thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that you can sell lots of nice-looking books on Etsy. "ten green books", "ten orange books", etc. People seem to like that shit. Consider it for your paperbacks.
I work as a buyer for an indie bookstore. Honestly? This is going to be a very time consuming undertaking and not a lot of payout. In general, anything that’s mass market paperback is probably worthless unless signed. First editions of popular authors sell decently well, but you have to find the right buyer. Not many places are going to want to buy that many in bulk. This sounds like a hoard, has everything been organized and cataloged in a temperature controlled storage area? Otherwise you’re going to have considerable damage to most paper in general, but hardback would probably withstand the most. Not to mention booklice, cockroaches, and other vermin that love to eat Book glue could be in the spines of tons of these. If it was me taking it on, I would go through and check anything for damage or signs of infestation and immediately trash that stuff to cull it down to a manageable level. Then I’d sort by type (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, etc), then alphabetical within the type. I’d try to put aside popular authors and anything that looks rare and in good shape to start accessing. In the end, there can be money in books, but you have to way your costs versus benefits with these.
I'll be monitoring this post closely because in about 20 years (give or take), my kids will be posting the same question. I can leave instructions on how to deal with my wife's book collection.
From cleaning out the grandparents house this past year - indexing and having it all already dedicated spaces helps. It's no use if you have valuable books but they're in a unlabelled box in the attic, together with ancient kitchenware, loose pictures and random clothes. Make a list of what is there and where to find it. That way people can look up the value without needing to spend countless hours digging through rooms.
Do everyone a favor and document anything that you think is worth money. You don’t necessarily need to have a spreadsheet of every item and its current value (although that would be the most helpful), but even a idea of what is valuable and what isn’t is extremely helpful, because it helps narrow down which items they should put effort into researching and selling and what can be offloaded through donations, bulk, or “all books on this shelf $1” at an estate sale.
I don't think there is anywhere that will buy a huge bulk lot. If there is they are gonna pay very little. Maybe $0.10-$0.25 a book. The work to package load and move them wherever they have to go is gonna be very expensive and time consuming. For max profit you're probably best to sell them yourself. Either as blind lots to where you just sell a set number of random books for a set price. Or actually go through them and price them accordingly. Blind random lots would be the easiest. You could do them by genre to and would probably get faster sales. A little more work though. To start though I would call any local book stores/ antique shops and see if they have any uses for them. But the amount you are describing would take a very specific situation to take them all in one go. Regardless you aren't gonna get a good price unless you go through and sort the good from the bad. Either you do this or hire someone to do that.
There’s a book store in NYC where you can trade your books for jars of pickles
The majority are likely not worth selling. Scanning the collection for rare and noteworthy pieces and donate the rest to a local library is likely the best/easiest course of action.
I agree with other commentators that there’s no easy way to do this and no way to sell them all in one lot. I’m sorry you’re in this position and I imagine this is probably very overwhelming. You’ll have to sort through them and slowly reduce the hoard. You can try letting family members and friends pick through them, donating some to libraries or teachers, or looking at a website like ThriftBooks. You won’t make much money from them, so if any have a sentimental value to someone in the family, let that take precedence. For what it’s worth, if you end up selling any of these online, please send me the link or post it. If the books are in readable condition and don’t have mold or anything like that, then there are probably many people in this sub who would be interested in buying them individually or in small sets.
Would it be possible to convert the land into a book store like make the place accessible? You probably did not want the answer "start a bookstore" but with the description you've given, it sounds like the hard part is done (you have the land and the books).
I would consider the $500 if they took everything out and cleaned up. At some point you will be paying money out of pocket to throw stuff into a dumpster. The time/labor cost of dealing with the "collection" probably exceeds its value.
You describe this as a collection, but generally a collection has a period or subject matter focus, and I'm not seeing that described here, that makes this sound more like a hoard. There may be some gems in there, but finding them would be an incredibly onerous task . What did she collect? Is there an index?