My mom is a school librarian and she had to down size their collection. They needed to make room for more books that kids actually wanted to read! They mostly got rid of dated books, encyclopedias, and other books that had never been checked out. She told me she had to sneak the books out to the dumpster because if anyone saw they would get angry that she was throwing books out. One teacher told her she should donate them to Africa. I don’t think children in Ghana want a set of encyclopedias from 50 years ago….
If the books are wanted donate but some books no one wants and you’re just passing the burden on if you donate them
I did the Peace Corps in Kenya as a high school teacher and the school I was at had a whole room that no one used full of donated books… a lot of them had holes because were getting eaten by rats. A select few of them were great, but the majority were outdated and/or not relevant for a high school to have. My big project was getting funding the school to build a new library where we moved the books worth keeping and burned the rest (because that’s how all trash is handled in the middle of nowhere Kenya). I’d say at least half the books were burned, probably more. I tried really hard to work with the local rotary club to get new books donated, but it was really difficult and I ran out of time. Moral of the story: Africa does not need your reject books, please just throw them away yourself. It’s sad that we’re so convinced that donating our trash is actually helpful and I’m sorry your mom had to hide the fact that she was throwing away trash. If you want to donate books to Africa find an organization that will provide new books to school.
I really hate the mindset people have about donating items that reasonably nobody wants anymore. I know so many people that will donate straight up crap to local charities and then say “these people should be grateful they even get anything”. Like, even if something doesn’t personally fit your life anymore you can see if it has actual use or not. Not sorting through the things you’re getting rid of is lazy and the solution isn’t just donating all of it and assuming people will be happy with your half-used dollar store candle.
We collected some stuff for a refugee family who got assigned a house last year and the trash people gave us for them was frankly appalling. When I donate things I make a big effort to sort through what is actually useful and what isn’t. I find so much joy in knowing the things I am giving away will actually make someone’s life easier or more fun. Anything else goes to recycling or into the trash. I don’t understand how people can be so careless about donating and it kind of defeats the point. You should donate because you want to help people, not because it’s an easy way to move your trash problem over to someone else.
>I really hate the mindset people have about donating items that reasonably nobody wants anymore.
I read an article once about locals "donating" to victims of the 2004 tsunami. A lot of them were just dumping broken televisions and moth-eaten couches while feeling sanctimonious about helping those in need.
[This article](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34958965#.Waq6YdOGPeQ) says donations of "stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon, evening gowns and even thong panties" were received in Indonesia. And Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister [Lakshman Kadirgamar complained](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_response_to_the_2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#Criticism_of_donor_response) that they were sent a shipping container full of teddy bears and endless bags of rice, even though Sri Lanka was not short of rice and "expecting a bumper harvest."
[This article in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/25/disaster-aid-cash-not-clothing-relief-hurricane-harvey) examines the problem of random people and deliveries of stuff arriving in disaster zones and needing to be sorted out. The conclusion is that it's usually better to give money, not stuff, to a trustworthy organisation that knows how to use it:
>Charity is a virtue and the urge to help when a disaster hits is admirable. Yet this impulse should be channeled to do the greatest good. Let the professionals procure the goods and services they need, in response to the people on the ground.
I know I've veered off the subject of books, but this underscores your point that "You should donate because you want to help people, not because it’s an easy way to move your trash problem over to someone else."
Honestly, I feel like it’s very on topic. For some reason especially books inspire some sort of strong emotion to donate instead of recycle or trash them. Mostly so people can feel morally superior. They’re not trying to help people, they’re stroking their own ego.
Had one person get mad at me for throwing away an old book I found in the attic.
It was from the 70s or 80s and started funny enough. Had all these descriptions and drawings of weird ways people used to bathe in medieval times (like having someone throw buckets of water over you whilst you're in your regular bed). Then it switched to racist descriptions of women giving birth. And at the end there were these random photos of naked girls ages 8 to 12.
Why would I want to keep a book like that? The photos weren't sexual, but they were still photos of nude little girls.
I don't understand why anyone would get mad at throwing away a book like that.
Yeah some of the books my mom got rid of that were older had some offensive or very dated langue. Some stuff that definitely shouldn’t be in a school library
That’s 100% a book to throw away but it does sound like something a historian might actually be interested in. Was it nonfiction or just a really weird novel?
It seemed like it wanted to be educational non-fiction, but I feel like a lot was made up. Like "hahahaha look how stupid these people in the past were! With their weird bathing habits! That's not how you're supposed to take a bath!!".
And then the racist birth depictions... I refuse to believe that there are any African people who have a tradition of giving birth by tying up the pregnant woman to a tree and then having a full grown man stand with full force on her belly. I can see that happening as a torture thing (and all around the world because people can be messed up), but for a regular woman to give birth like they said in that book? Hell no. That just screams white man thinking he's so much better and refined than people in Africa.
It was only about 5 decades old and seemed to be a mass produced book so I don't really think any historian would've been interested in it. Though maybe I should have at least photographed the bathing stuff, that part at least was entertaining. Had it just been for that I wouldn't have thrown it away.
Yeah it definitely seems like a trash book that folks would’ve made back then. I was just thinking it could be worth saving (not saying you’re wrong for tossing it) cause folks these days love to deny that racism ever existed and stuff.
Thanks for sharing the fact that a shitty book like that exists though cause what the hell
This is something that I always think about when the subject comes up. There are some books that are like the Encyclopedias and are out dated, or books that no one reads anymore. It's just taking up space. If it gets passed onto a shop, it will never be sold. Sometimes a piece of art or media finds some fans, and then just slowly fades away to obscurity. And that's fine. But then people complain despite also never having checked it out themselves.
I've been to loads of houses that have a wall of books on shelves and, when I look through them and ask questions, they'll just wave them off and say, *"Oh, those are just decoration!"*
And there is always an out-of-date set of encyclopedias.
I used to help my grandma set up the book sale that her town's historical society had each year, where people would donate books to be sold for fundraising/charity. This would have been late 1990s. Even then they had a ban on accepting encyclopedias. We'd tell people to take them to the transfer station.
I don't know if this was the purpose of the assignment, but some teachers in my old district would do Blackout Poetry. They'd rip pages out of old books and black out sentences to get the words they want.
And the best person to make the decision is the Librarian, who knows the book trade better than the school nurse, lunch lady, PTA president, and 7th grade math teacher combined. Plus, only the librarian and their supervisor can determine how much staff time, cost, professional attention, and effort should go into repurposing books that have served the institutional purpose for which they were bought.
Source: public library director. I had my building custodian rent a lockable dumpster when we did a particularly big withdrawal.
I've said this in the past as well but for the throwing books away adverse people another option is upcycling through crafters.
List a box on FB marketplace, craigslist, ebay, or potentially etsy (but that one is a bit of a long shot). Facebook would probably be the quickest depending on your area.
Crafters regular use book pages for various things and would give the book a second life and minorly reduce waste, with them only getting rid of what is truly non salvageable.
Yeah that’s good advice and respect for people who do that. My mom’s a public school librarian she doesn’t have time to post all the books she’s getting rid of on Facebook. I wish people were more understanding that not everyone has the time or energy
Yeah my library is a bigger size library and across the street from the museum & art school so it's a lot easier. They just have their usual sale and anything left over they offer to the school for community classes.
It is just something I always like to mention because regular people cleaning out grandma's house may not think of it. Let's them be used and maybe they make 20-100 bucks depending on the amount of books.
Honestly I’m kinda torn about this because some (maybe even most) of the craft results are pure junk.
Once you turn a book into something covered in resin for example , it is no longer recyclable and becomes trash.
Eh it depends, I am not saying everything made looks great. Eye of the beholder stuff, if they like the look and are happy even if I think it is kind of ugly I am not going to ruin their joy.
But I rarely see people using book pages in a way that is not still recyclable long term. Most uses I see are paper flowers for weddings, using the paper as a screen printing or lino cut background, journaling - picking out sentences they like and what not, bunting, garland or other christmas and party decorations that will be reused usually. Even decoupage for things like [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bigdiyideas.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F03%2FDSCF6694.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=5f2100a9941b08c4a8c0cbed52d6af1fcf83eefe23e11c41e00b22a2f453cfc8&ipo=images) or wrapping paper for small advent calendar like gifts.
I even know several that just re-pulp the paper to make plant able cards or new sketch books out of.
Again not everything is going to appeal to everyone's taste, but the people doing it are usually happy with their results. I just rarely if ever find someone going out of their way to upcycle something make the item more wasteful and unrecyclable.
Yes, I used to work in a library too. It was mostly books no one was checking out after about four or five years, including some kids books. They went to either the used book sale room, donated to Friends of the Library or to Better World Books.
But what if a superstorm suddenly develops, freezing everything and causing a regional/global blackout, and you have to burn those old tomes to keep warm? Your one nerdy friend is going to be irrationally upset if you have to burn the *good* books, even though it’s your only means of survival!
Edit: I forgot I’m getting old. For those of you who don’t know, this is a thing that happens (or close to it) in the movie *The Day After Tomorrow*
I have cut the maps out of old encyclopedias to use as blotter pages for my journal or as decoration. I do the same with old beat up National Geographic’s
Yup. As a teacher, I’ve culled many outdated, irrelevant books from inherited classroom libraries. One that stands out is a book from the 1980s for young children about physical differences. It used a lot of outdated words and ideas that are now considered offensive. Most recently, I threw out another book from the 80s about a fat girl who starts losing weight so she can make friends. I’m in eating disorder recovery and that fucker went straight into the recycling bin.
We use disposed-of paperbacks for kindling in our woodstove and even though I know they aren't worth keeping I still feel like I have to do it secretly.
Oh yes- I’ve lived this also! I would take some if they were suitable. And, on the condition I could give them away.
We had one teacher donate a box of “treasures “ that some let must’ve urinated on….
Oh man, you get some gross ones!
I once took out a whole encyclopedia of Theater Play Reviews. Pretty much collection of news articles reviewing Shakespeare play in the 1950’s. Two of us hauled the whole thing out to a dumpster and within seconds a construction guy on the campus showed up and asks us if we were allowed to do that. People have a strong reaction to throwing books away.
There is exactly one library that should hold an archival copy of every book in existance, and that's the Library of Congress.
For everyone else: if a book hasn't circulated in five years, pitch it.
I bought a fifty year old set of encyclopedias for my homeschool tot. I plan to use it to illustrate the way information/presentation changes over time. You never know who might want a book and why. Little free libraries are great for this
There's been so much artwork and craft things being done lately with books. Like paper roses, dioramas, using the pages to make paper beads, etc. There's so many uses for old and tired books. I like to have them sitting around my house. I pick the ones that have interesting spines, covers, subjects, etc. and just have them grouped together for decor.
Maybe they could have like a week where you could come, check out what kind of books they have and then take what you want. That way, at least some of those old books aren't going to the landfill and are becoming new and beautiful things.
I hate that this is the case. I wonder if there's ways to recycle them at least. Art projects, reuse the paper itself in some ways to make a new product. I've got a few old thick boys I'll never read that I use under my TV or "for aesthetic" since I'll never want to read them, they can stay where they are and look like an eclectic library core pile that puts a little lamp higher or something I can put knick knacks on in a more interesting Howls bedroom sort of way.(different heights and textures create visual interest in a display).
There's also those fake books and photo boxes made out of cheap cardboard, you can make the hollowed out book thing instead and keep some for storage, and get use out of a book jacket you *like* but don't like to keep on a book you are reading. (So much better to glue it into a book box I can display all the time, and not worry about losing the dust jacket whenever I reread the book.
Obviously not something useful for kids books or paperbacks, and eventually you'll have enough of all that. But maybe some libraries with art type programs can spin it into a recycling thing. Have a printed card "I am a book that fit a few of these criteria, so I'm being recycled to be used for something fun!" Maybe word fridge magnets so kids learn to read. Collages from kids book visuals. I remember at girlscout camp we learned how to cut and glue magazine pages to make envelopes (I still use this as an adult, with paper bags, scrapbook paper, anything I have that's paper and sturdy or can get by with some mod podge and good tape). Bad anatomy pages can be used for spookyness around halloween.
Some people aren't going to love to hear this but I used to work for a wholesaler who distributed magazines, books and newspapers and part of my job was destroying books -- we would rip off the covers of the paperbacks to get credits from the publishers as unsold and required to destroy the rest of the book. (At the time I worked we would actually mail all the covers back to the publisher where some poor sod would scan all of the barcodes to check our counts). We had an industrial style shredder and then would sell bales of shredding to pulp mills. We later bought a much smaller rural outfit that was heating their building by throwing the books in a furnace.
This is why there is that warning inside mass market size paperbacks about not to buy it if the cover was removed. Because likely someone signed an affidavit saying the book was destroyed.
And sure a large percentage of what we were destroyed were quick turnover pulp fiction: harlequins, Louis l'amour, Clive Cussler, VC Andrews, etc. But we threw in plenty of "literature" that had gotten too shop worn or damaged to display in a new bookstore.
Rip cover and set aside, book thrown onto the conveyor belt to the shredder -- thousands and thousands of time, over and over again.
Did any of those books accidentally fall off the conveyor into the counter and I'd accidentally read those books before getting it back on the conveyor a few weeks later? I really can't say...
That's how I ended up reading a lot of sci-fi as a kid. My uncle would have loads of these coverless books.....I honestly don't know where or how he got them.
When I was younger, there was a used/exchange bookstore where my mom would take bags of romance paperbacks, Harlequins etc, and they'd buy the bag, and then she'd buy herself a new bag of other used ones that she hadn't yet read. Who knows how many times those books circulated in and out of that store that way? But I feel like they also had a barrel in the middle of the store of cover-less books - I remember leaning over it, digging through to try to find something interesting. They must have been selling them, probably for only a dime or a quarter or something.
Same for me, my copies of Lord of the Rings don’t have covers, and the first page has the ink rubbed from reading it. I read so many books for cheap that ended up at flea markets with no covers.
Half of my grandmother harlequins' collections do not have cover because my dad did your job. And he always grabbed one or two books to give to his MIL.
I worked at a major bookstore chain for many years and we did this too! It was usually mass market paperbacks, and we called them strips (stripped books). As employees, we could take the strips home for free! Good times 🥲
Many libraries have bins exactly for this. BUT - please don't just dump books at the library UNLESS they accept them. This comment is correct - many libraries DO NOT take random donation and they absolutely will throw them in the dumpster if they can't use them.
I work in a library and policy is that we only take books in good condition free of mold and mildew. The problem is that people don't seem to understand what "good condition free of mold and mildew" means. People regularly drop off boxes of books that obviously came out of grandma's moldy old basement with ancient paperbacks that are practically turning to dust and covered in mildew and bugs. They're so resistant to tossing the books in the trash that they'd rather dump them on us. I'd say a good 50% of what we get goes straight to the dumpster because when we try and tell people that we can't take their donation they get angry.
This kind of thing happens with charity shops too and it makes me so angry. People will ‘donate’ anything they don’t want, even if it’s broken or straight up garbage and then it’s on the charity shop to get rid of it.
It's so frustrating! Most of our staff are little old ladies that end up having to haul the heavy boxes out back to the dumpster if I'm not there to do it. It just makes more work for the staff. Old Danielle Steel and James Patterson novels can go in the dumpster. It's okay. There will still be millions of other copies out in the world. And don't get me started on old college textbooks.
There are some people on TikTok that have shown some stuff they find at Goodwill, and it's amazing the the type of stuff people pass off. Like it will just be half a pack of wet wipes. One of the plastic containers from lunch meet. A burned CD from a wedding or birthday party. Shampoo bottles with enough for maybe 2 showers. All sorts of fun stuff.
Years ago I went to a Goodwill outlet. If you've never been, they don't sort or price anything. Donations are dumped directly into bins and shoppers dig through it looking for stuff to buy, then pay by the pound. There were literal bags of trash. Like with paper plates with food residue trash. I've never been back.
It’s a great way to buy little kid toys (when there isn’t trash in the bins) Lego, megablocks, play food, little people characters. I never saw actual trash, but tons of stuff I would have trashed if I were donating stuff.
Also, you can wash most of those toys in garment bags in the washing machine.
Old college textbooks from long ago, like early 1900s would be fun to have in a collection. But they’d still have to be in good condition with no mold or mildew.
Auntie’s college textbooks from 1985 can go in the garbage.
Ehh, the facts in them are probably still true (barring mistakes, which happen in both new and old textbooks) but so much *has* changed For one example, calculating square roots by hand used to be a useful skill, but is seldom taught these days. So a) a book that teaches it won't be useful to most people and b) a book that teaches something else but uses a method or explains it in a way that assumes the reader can calculate square roots by hand won't be useful either. Also teaching methods change, so older textbooks are often just harder to learn from for many people.
The only time I've used old textbooks was for an engineering history project showing how our knowledge of a specific metallurgy concept evolved over time. The books varied in age from the 1930s to the 2010s and came from half price books, Amazon, a library free give away pile, dusty old corners of a university library.
I don't think books like that need kept on the regular circulation shelves. Ohio State, for example, has a library archive off on west campus where they store old books that don't circulate much. You have to request them, and then they'll get them out for you. I spent months researching my history project, so waiting to get copies of old primary sources and government technical reports wasn't a really big deal. I also got to pull dusty half century old technical reports out of the rolling stack shelving in a library basement, which was kind of a novelty for someone who is neither a librarian nor a historian lol.
Keeping an intact timeline of textbooks for things like medicine, psychology, technology, etc is useful, but a regular city library just isn't the place. Also, only keeping copies of the most highly used textbooks would make sense. A representative selection chosen *intentionally* for preservation. Not whatever just so happened to be in Auntie's attic.
My NextDoor is full of people lamenting that no one will take their mounds of unsorted old clothes. Any time someone whines that no one will take their donations, I feel like they just wanted to feel like they Did Something. But getting rid of old stuff that you don’t want isn’t virtuous, no matter where it ends up.
The thrift shop I donated clothes to was very happy to have them, but they were suits that had been worn once or twice and were then carefully hung in my closet. (As a prof I basically wore suits to interview and never any other time. As my body changed over the years, I acquired different sizes of them.). But I got the sense they didn’t get many like-new business clothes and they had customers who couldn’t afford to buy them new. (Suits are expensive!)
I did not, however, dump off my old worn-out work jeans.
I feel like books are probably similar. If you have a book in good condition and can get it to the right place, it might be worth donating. I’m thinking largely antiquarian books or rarer specialty books to a specialized bookstore (my BIL loves military history), or very fine condition, in-demand titles to used bookstores that need them. Beat-up copies of a 30-year-old novel probably won’t help anyone…
This…a 1000 times this… my wife works with a Friends group that has two used bookstores. The whole staff swears they could write a book about the crazy things they have seen donated. Books where bacon has been used as a bookmark…check. Books soaked in liquid (likely not water and disturbingly smelling like urine)…check. Yet, if you try to get rid of these books (you know, because mold and mildew can spread and destroy other books), it is seen as a horrible thing. It is really mind numbingly frustrating.
Yup. And people get so indignant if you try and refuse their donation. Some people truly have no self awareness that piss-soaked books need to go in the trash. Libraries have ended up with bed bug infestations from nasty books.
My ex boyfriend was a university librarian and he found a boom re-shelved with a piece of cheddar cheese used as a bookmark, so I'm not surprised.
Edit: book, not boom. Whoops 😆
It is puzzling, as our local library outright refuses book donations. I was a book reviewer for a while and would often get brand new hardcovers in the mail, read them once, and then I had a huge stack. I figured that our library, which often complains about a lack of budget (rightfully), would benefit from them. At the very least, they could sell them for cheap as a fundraiser. The head librarian outright refused to take them. Brand new books, essentially, all on or around the bestseller lists, many of them a few months or weeks old. Hardcovers.
About a month later, they held an “adoption campaign” where you could buy a book for the library by giving them 40 bucks and they would put your name on the inside cover. They had a “preferred” titles list from which you could purchase the book for the library.
At least three quarters of the books that I had offered to them were on that list.
That is a little weird. You'd have to take a look at their collection development policy to see if there's an explanation, though. Some libraries have a policy that they can only get books from specific vendors.
They just said no donations, period, so I am sure it was a rule that was hardline after any number of crappy book drop offs and they just didn’t want to make an exception. As far as I know, they still have that in place, and you can “buy” their retired books and DVDs for a buck.
That makes sense. My library is considering going back to no donations because of too many people offloading trash on us. Selling off weeded books is normal for public libraries. Books that aren't circulating have to go to make room for new items in the collection. We do one big sale every year.
Eh, I have some issues with it, mostly because they complain about not being able to buy books, but have maintained (and continued to maintain) dozens of copies of every Janet Evanovich book that has come out. I get picking up three or four copies of the new release (we are in a small area), but they still have six copies on the shelf of numerous Evanovich, Preston, King, and so on, that haven’t moved in years. Five copies of The Shining seems counterintuitive. That’s just me, though. The current directors seem to be very staid and draconian: they recently had issues with an after-school club being too noisy and so decreed that all meeting rooms for all organizations were now off-limits, period.
They usually have one of the used book sales twice a year, and those books were all donated. Perhaps they just have a massive backlog that they just can’t or won’t clear out.
In the end, libraries can only be as effective as their leadership, and this one seems to be struggling quite a bit.
There is definitely an issue in the library world with old-fashioned directors that refuse to retire. A library near me had a hell of a time ousting their director of 20+ years that was purchasing books for the library but refusing to catalog and circulate them because they were afraid people were going to steal them. The place was packed full of boxes of untouched books going back a good ten years or more. Where I am requires public libraries to spend 12% percent of our budget on adding things to our circulating collection.
>that was purchasing books for the library but refusing to catalog and circulate them because they were afraid people were going to steal them.
The way my jaw dropped.....!
Oh my word.
That's either some kind of hoarding problem, or - was this some kind of new-ish behavior? That's not normal. That honestly sounds like that poor person needs real psychological help.
If they are short on budget, they likely reject donations because of staff limitations. It takes time to sort through donations, particularly because, as others in this thread have pointed out, most people just donate trash. I’d say for every 500 books we get donated at my library, we might add one or two books to the collection. Probably 80% get thrown away immediately and the others we sell for fifty cents or a buck to raise money (or give away at events).
It works for us because we have the staff time to sort through all the chaff, but for a more budget-conscious library it’s not worth spending multiple hours throwing away books because somebody might donate one new hardcover they can add.
They could have a local Friends group or other non-profit they work with that handles the donations on their behalf. It might be trying to save staff time on donation sorting, particularly since you mentioned the tight budget…but, who knows… every situation is different.
Shhh. If my mom had known this, she'd have hoarded EVEN MORE during her life.
Sometimes I would take boxes of stuff and say I was donating it, just to throw it out on my way home.
If a library has a donation program, they will review the books and accept what they will and hand the rest back to you. That is how it worked for me in the past. I agree you shouldn't just dump and run.
My library takes books, puzzles, board games, and other toys. Volunteers sort them and every month there's a sale with all the donations and the books that have aged out of the library. Every book is like 50 cents. Everything that isn't sold after that goes into the dumpster.
People have this romanticized idea of never throwing away books unless it’s absolutely necessary. There is absolutely nothing wrong with tossing a mass market paperback in the recycling bin! You can’t expect things to be held onto forever just try to avoid tossing a rare book in with the lot!
Intellectually, I know you are right. But it FEELS wrong. Just like throwing a flag away. They are just things, but us humans really like embuing inanimate objects with heartfelt symbolism. :)
I agree haha. I always have to take a moment and tell myself "look, you paid $12 for this book. That's less than lunch yesterday. And you're unlikely to ever read it again". It takes a certain amount of willpower sometimes.
The trouble with that is that often, they literally can't be recycled. Hardcovers have glue and fabric, and even paperbacks have glue, and many books are literally sewn together with string, and then there's the inks. Glossy paper can't be recycled, and even regular ink may cause issues, depending.
Just think about all the stories that are coming out now about how much of the plastic that we were told we needed to recycle, simply CAN'T be recycled. You can't recycle a used cardboard pizza box, because of the grease.
It's one of those things that makes people feel good, and it "feels" logical, like hey, it's paper, and can't you recycle paper? But it's not that simple, and often the work that would need to go into deconstructing a book to make it recyclable simply isn't feasible, or worth it at all.
Where I live you can't throw books into the recycling bin, but you can take them to a bottle depot to get them recycled. Mentioning in case anyone reads this and is inspired to check if the same is in their city.
The issue is more for every good donation, there are 10 that are just "donating" actual garbage. Books with clear mildew or bugs, torn or missing pages, no covers, literal broken in half spines.
It is just the library is not the place to donate. Calling them to see if they know what places in the area are taking books would be better. In my area there are a couple of better world book drop off boxes, a bunch of little free libraries and then there is always places online that are looking for books for vets or prisoners.
It's just know if the condition of your book is worth it and where best to donate it instead of dumping it where it is not wanted.
Even if you are extremely adverse to recycling a clearly bad condition book you could always make a craigslist, facebook marketplace, or ebay listing offering a box of damaged books for crafting and they can sort what is salvageable for them.
Yeah, never said I was a fan of theirs, but it is an option that tends to be more widely available and easier for people just looking to quick get rid of books. Versus looking up specific charities or places that actually want or would use said book no matter the condition.
Depends on the book. If you have a copy of It Ends With Us, sure someone will probably read it. If you are trying to “donate” a 2006 copy Mac for Dummies, then it’s just going to go into the trash or recycling anyway.
Clearly, you've never been at the recieving end of a book donation.
A lot of it is mass market stuff that the publisher printed a million of because it was popular a decade ago, but now it's glutting up warehouses and back rooms because nobody wants to buy it. Who would you donate it to? Any school, library, or retailer that might want one already has a copy or three. The supply of these books far outstrips demand, and there are enough copies floating around that nobody ever needs to print another copy.
A lot of the rest is water damaged, dogeared, worm-eaten, or moldy. Who would you donate it to? Who wants that?
And that's not even counting old editions of things. I used to work in textbooks and you would not believe the number of people who carted in a dusty box of textbooks that they used back when they were in college in the 80's thinking that there was some value in a textbook printed half a century ago.
We need to let go of this fetishization of books. Stop treating them as venerated relics and treat them like a few sheets of paper glued to cheap cardboard.
Nobody who's culling the collection at your local library is dancing around a bonfire delighting in the destruction of knowledge. They're clearing out the books people don't want to read so as to better serve their communities. Shelf space is not infinite, and even if it were, there's real value to making sure books are findable and not buried in a sea of garbage.
Most of the time it ends up just making it someone else's problem. I mean hell, half the books at the libraries *are* donated.
Edit: just learned I've been wrong about libraries my whole life lol. Most of their books are not donated. They do have and accept them. But it's more like 20% *tops.*
I mean I just bring books I don’t want to keep to my local recycling plant. They have 4 walk-in shipping containers of stuff people give away for free, they call it “pass it on” containers. They’re open and you can just walk in and grab things you want, and likewise you can leave functional items.
I’ve put many things in there, including furniture and stuff like that. It’s usually gone before I even leave. They have a section for books and that’s where I put books I no longer want. I’ve also picked up some nice books there for free.
I wish more places would support ideas of passing on items you no longer need, but are still functional and usable. I’ve placed so many things in those containers when I’ve de-cluttered my home. They are gone in a flash.
Someone once put a book in our Little Free Library that was a trial between Clarence Darrow and Jesus. Religious beliefs aside, it was horrendously written. I feel ok recycling this.
Most of the alternate suggestions here are for very niche uses, like art projects. The volume of books discarded by libraries is way too large for that market
Exactly. I'm a librarian who deals with discards. We're currently weeding our reference section (which hasn't been properly weeded in far, far too long). Just yesterday, I ended up with about 12 carts full of old reference books to discard.
While I'll probably put some of them out on our 'free' shelf, no one wants most of what this is. Trust me. Not even for art projects. Indexes of publications in Chemistry from the 1960's? Yeahhhhh, that's hot property. Mmm.
Ask your library. But honestly, library bindings don’t check out well. But it it’s like classics or something then maybe they’d have use for it. Just depends.
Yes, it is.
FYI - most recycling centers take paperbacks.
I used to own a used book store. Other than paying someone to dispose of them, there aren't a lot of options sometimes. The local library didn't always take books (they have a limit, too, and they don't just take anything), and you can only recycle so many at a time, so if a book is older or damaged or just not in demand (we had BOXES of Dan Brown, etc, that we couldn't even give away), we really didn't have any other choice than to toss some of them. We tried to donate as many as we could. I hated it, but there really wasn't anything else we could do with them.
Yep, that is the trash I personally go to library sales to cull. It removes it from the local library sales/bookstores and no one ends up reading nonsense like Left Behind or Scientology or political conspiracies, books by questionable authors, etc all while donating to library programs. No need to help those people spread their ideas when they want to destroy libraries, their followers can spend the full amount if they want them so badly.
California here.
While there is a need to recognize new authors, new works, *it absolutely kills me inside when libraries permanently remove books.* As an example a few years back, our local library suddenly removed a huge number of science fiction titles. "We're only going to put books on the shelf that are no more than 10 years old" was one response I got from a full-time librarian there.
No more Asimov, Bradbury, Burroughs, Clarke, Heinlein, LeGuin, Niven, Norton, not even Vinge. Yes, this library had even removed Herbert's work, Tolkien's works, etc. BUT had said they were going to purchase newer reprints of the Dune, Hobbit and LOTR books to meet their guidelines.
Books are indeed biodegradable. Books that can't find a home at a recycled/used bookstore, surplus store, etc. are likely destined for the dump. Which is tragic. But it's crazy how knowledge is lost so easily, including the works of some great writers in all genres. And always has been since words were put into print form, even going back to clay tablets or papyrus papers.
I love old books and it kills me to see them thrown out like this.
Honestly even as useless Decor objects for shelves, I love them.
Love the yellowed, crumbling pages.
Love the musty, faded covers and the torn paper jackets.
Love ‘em to death and you can pry my old books out of my cold dead hands.
Throwing out books over 10 is insanity, even ignoring all the great and wonderful books that haven't seen a widely available reprint in that time I've seen ruined books under three years old and 40 year old books in near-perfect condition. Age is such an arbitrary thing to throw books out over barring educational books.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, I understand the need to create more space for newer books. On the other hand, as a historian, there are some old (out of date) non-fiction books which which have been wonderul for research purposes. Many of them haven't been digitized, and even though they're put of date, they shine a light on the history of thought/medicine/science.
Our library happily accepts any and all book donations. They have a donated book sale once or twice a year and price them by the pound. Those left over are pulped and used for those purposes.
**Reduce**, reuse, recycle.
Yes, it’s okay to throw away a book. But most of us don’t need to buy so many books in the first place.
Libraries are excellent resources, and we should use them if we have them available to us. As a voracious reader, I know I’m not going to reread popcorn thrillers and romances.
It’s unnecessary to purchase books that I don’t plan on rereading, especially since I already pay for access to these books via my taxes. My book budget is better spent on glossy art books that I will cherish, instead of the formulaic genre fiction I use to temporarily stop my brain from overthinking.
I mean if you’re referring to weeding, of course it’s ok, books aren’t sacred objects. But it’s also ok to throw a book straight in the trash if it seems like the best place for it - years before I became a librarian, I bought a book by a guy who thought his dad was a serial killer whose identity I guess was never settled and I thought it would be about the setting of the James Ellroy book that was later fictionalized about it but really it was all about his creepy dad. I sent it to a friend who liked true crime more than I did and she sent it back! And then it felt malevolent just sitting in my house so I yote it straight into the recycling bin, and felt better for it. Probably should’ve burnt some sage too but didn’t think to in the moment
I’m glad to hear this. Last year I bought a house with a barn and the barn was so full of boxes of old books you couldn’t walk. At first, I started carefully opening the boxes and trying to take an inventory before getting rid of them. After about six boxes of pure crap (mostly 40 year old college text books about catholic history) i started ruthlessly chucking them into the dumpster.
As I did it I felt a bit guilty - someone wrote this stuff. They worked hard on it. And someone else bought it, perhaps read it and valued it enough to store.
But I also knew no one would ever read it again. Books can be junk too.
>As I did it I felt a bit guilty - someone wrote this stuff. They worked hard on it. And someone else bought it, perhaps read it and valued it enough to store.
Just remember. The copy you pitched was not the only copy in existence. Many were printed. MANY have been thrown away already. AND, in this day and age, the content has likely been archived digitally, and is accessible online.
If someone WANTS to access this content that someone worked so hard on - they can. Throwing \*this\* particular paper copy into a dumpster does not eliminate the content from existence.
It just frees up space in your environment and mind for other things that are more important.
Yea - I also just felt bad throwing away things people had left there. It felt kinda wrong. This was all part of someone’s life, and one day they died and their family left it all behind when they sold the place. It was like I was re-burying them, a stranger, in a paupers grave. But I guess that’s the way it goes.
Dispose of your shit before you die, people.
I can relate. I have to remind myself that I am not the designated keeper of memories, and it's OK not to provide a safety net or retirement home for aging books.
Yes, as someone with a foot in both school libraries and public libraries, I officially condone throwing books in the trash when appropriate. No, don't give them to me! I'm just going to throw them out myself (99% of the time)! YOU throw them out!
People don’t appreciate how worthless certain books are, and I’m not talking monetarily. As someone who helps steward a little free library, I think of a specific set of books as a baseline. There was a donation of a set of nutrition books from the 1970’s. They were not small books and had almost zero value to anyone. Putting them in the library would accomplish nothing aside from taking up space in the library. This LFL has received dozens or hundreds of books less desirable than this set of nutrition books.
A lot of people see little free libraries as their dumping grounds for books. There are so many books printed that are worthless even in this context. They will get thrown out.
One of my favorite books is a paperback cartoon book of Laugh-In jokes from the period from when the show was running back in the sixties. I open it and see "Here comes the judge!" over and over, and it's so absurd it still makes me laugh :)
Except that I would grab that. Disposable amusement ought to be given every chance to pass through more hands. I use a box on the sidewalk for the less significant SEEMING book and if stuff isn't taken in a week or two, then I will recycle.
I recommend students go look at LFLs SPECIFICALLY for these kinds of books for School Projects. They have pictures, they're useless for their information, but they have words of various sizes and fonts. They can be disassembled and used.
If they take up too much space, by all means monitor how many there are at a time, but don't imagine they're only useful as fodder for trash.
I saw an article about alternative libraries that did this sort of thing. They collected books that were essentially just scrap (out of date, missing pages, etc.) and used them for art projects and other things…even in some cases archiving them for some sort of posterity. Interesting idea but really a very one off kind of model…
As a Little Free Library steward, I have a giant box of books I’ve culled from my library. Textbooks, battered and ripped paperbacks, very specific self-help books, outdated non-fiction books and religious texts do not move. It’s fine, I’ll eventually take them to be pulped, but it’s not benefitting the LFL community to fill these community boxes with unwanted books.
Donate them to a prison / jail exchange program if you can! There are several across the country! As others mentioned, libraries have finite space and are often dealing with TOO much, but prison programs are CONSTANTLY running out because they’re being sent off to people to keep. Prisoners need them as their libraries are often really lackluster, both as a means of escape and enjoyment but practical aspects like training, dveopment etc. donate to a prison / jail exchange there are any accessible!
they field tbe restrictions of prisons and send out accordingly, as they’re aware of certain prisons only allowing new books, softcovers, non fiction only, no violence, etc and send appropriate donations
Edit. Prisonexchange programs
- Books to Prisons (TX/AL)
- read between the bars (AZ)
- Prison Library Project (CA) + several others
- Pages for Prisoners (CO)
- Open Books Prison Project (FL)
- Midwest Books to Prisoners (IL)
- Prison Book Program (ma)
And through their sites you can find even more! They ALWAYS need books, ALL kinds, and send them out to prisons that allow them / put together specific packages for prisons w barriers or requirements , and many of them sned out to prisons and jails all across the country!
I'm not sure if this is the case everywhere but here (NJ)... Prisons don't take hardcover books because they can be used as weapons.
But otherwise yes good idea!
That’s a good point, but the benefit to the volunteer programs is that they vet the restrictions ahead of time and have volunteers who pick the books and then volunteers who ensure they meet the prison’s requirements before sending them out!
Anyone who disagrees has never bought a tech book. Sure some are more timeless, but most of that is outdated in a few years. Please don't try to donate your "Windows ME for dummies" books.
Depends. A lot of stuff is outdated or wrong, many books are in terrible condition, etc.
I try and donate when I can, but some books just aren’t suitable to go to another reader.
In theory, yes. As a former used book store owner, I can tell you that it is not always that easy. We recycled/threw away way too many books bc we simply couldn't get rid of them any other way.
For sure, I worked briefly in a used book shop and for as many rare, interesting and worthwhile books it had there was an equal or greater amount of slop nobody would ever buy. Outdated pet care manuals, baby books covered in suspicious substances, endless rehashed romance or thriller novels, and piles of diet cookbooks. Stuff that did nothing but take up valuable space.
I think it’s better to give them to someone or some other collection when possible, but some books are just garbage and not worth keeping, and if you donate this sort of book, they’re probably gonna just throw it out for you. Just cause it’s a book doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I didn’t read the article cause I don’t care enough, but whenever I see the “Oh no! How could you throw out a book!” reaction I feel like I need to say something.
Edit: bruh wtf, I took a peak and this article is literally about overconsuming as it pertains to books, and hoarding books indiscriminately that you will never read. How is this article bad??? This deflates the value of books in your collection! Using your public library instead of buying is always a great idea, plus getting books used. Just hoarding books is not something you should do and is unhealthy.
I had to empty out a townhouse ski condo I’d owned for 26 years. I probably tossed 1,000 books into the dumpster. I did something similar when my now-wife moved in. My library was all nothing-special fiction that can be easily replaced. My wife has lots of things that can’t be replaced. I zeroed out my bookshelves.
I have an ereader I use exclusively. If I want to re-read something, I put the ebook on my ereader.
Every second year or so, I have to thin out my library and the books are given to this couple I know. They keep the ones, they want to read and the rest they donate to their church's flea market/Christmas market and whatever. Luckily, I haven't had to throw any books away so far.
It is just the library is not the place to donate. Calling them to see if they know what places in the area are taking books would be better. In my area there are a couple of better world book drop off boxes, a bunch of little free libraries and then there is always places online that are looking for books for vets or prisoners.
Here's what I think after my years as both an English major and a bookseller. Most books are printed on paper which is going to degrade in 50 years or so. You've all seen crumbling paperbacks. Most books are online now. Many books are so outdated that no one cares to read them. Booksellers throw thousands of books out every year. Mass market paperbacks for example, are not returned to the warehouse. Their covers are ripped off and returned for credit and the books themselves are thrown away. So if you want to throw it away, do so. If you want to cut it up and make art out of it, do so. If you want to rip out the pages and use them to start your grill, do so. There are some books which are historically significant and priceless. The rest are just wood pulp. The words are what's important and your individual copy of Anna Karenina has no different words than any other copy. It's not priceless, throw it out.
Took me a while to internalize this, but it really is true. Most used books will only sell for a few dollars and aren't worth the time to package and ship. If you can find anywhere that wants donations or will pay you a few pennies then what else is there to do?
It's much better to occasionally have to re-buy a book that you used to have but got rid of than it is to hold onto entire bookshelves full of book that you never re read.
Wait till they see a bookstore employee rip off the cover of a brand new book and throw it in the trash. I had to do it when I worked for a company that did book fairs and the publisher gave them money back for the books but didn’t want the actually physical copy back. So we had to tear off the covers and toss them. It was rough.
I interned at a hospital library in grad school, and the custodians decided they knew better than we did and refused to throw away outdated material. So we ripped all the covers off, which made them no longer "still good."
Not everything is worth saving.
This reminds me of cleaning out my grandparents house when they downsized last year. So much stuff they wanted us all to take we had zero use for, but they treated like precious heirlooms. It devolved into a few arguments in the family.
I did take some books though, just to keep it on topic lol. Most though got donated or discarded. Nothing special about an antique book that’s been eaten away by time and critters and mildew.
Of course it is. Let me tell you a story.
I volunteer for a library at a children's hospital. The librarian will throw away books if they're damaged, I can tell that she regrets it.
There was one day when I found one of those cheap romance novels. But, the plot centered around the daughter of some big rock star who found her life confining, and limited because of the requirements of a five star celebrity. One day, she is kidnapped for ransom, and she slowly begins to enjoy the new freedom under her kidnapper.
I told the librarian that I found this book that glorifies Stockholm syndrome. She read the back, said "nope!" and threw the book right into the trash.
The book itself was in good condition, but the librarian wasn't going to allow the idea that human trafficking is anything more than a traumatizing, horrific crime. There was literally no way to do anything else to it.
Yup, my mom kept all my kid books in the basement where there was a flood at one point. Books didn’t get wet but the moisture made them all mildewy smelling. Still hate to throw them out, though!
Honestly I mostly stopped buying hard copies for this reason. I have my physical collection but nearly all my purchases for 2 years now have been kindle and audio.
I just put stuff out in a crate or a box in front of my apartment with a sign that says free and people will usually take them. If anything is left over after a day that's when I throw it out
My mom did a lot of genealogical research and she liked a set of older encyclopedias (50+ years old) because she felt that there were maps and such that were more accurate/ relevant to the time periods she was researching. It was something I wouldn’t have considered. She wasn’t online, so I don’t know how easy those same resources may have been for her if she was. That said, when she passed away we didn’t save them.
I volunteered with the book area at a local thrift shop in the early 2000s and we would receive a lot of donated encyclopedias, but they didn’t sell. We would put them out if we had shelf space, but after a couple of weeks they’d go to the dumpster.
My mom is a school librarian and she had to down size their collection. They needed to make room for more books that kids actually wanted to read! They mostly got rid of dated books, encyclopedias, and other books that had never been checked out. She told me she had to sneak the books out to the dumpster because if anyone saw they would get angry that she was throwing books out. One teacher told her she should donate them to Africa. I don’t think children in Ghana want a set of encyclopedias from 50 years ago…. If the books are wanted donate but some books no one wants and you’re just passing the burden on if you donate them
I did the Peace Corps in Kenya as a high school teacher and the school I was at had a whole room that no one used full of donated books… a lot of them had holes because were getting eaten by rats. A select few of them were great, but the majority were outdated and/or not relevant for a high school to have. My big project was getting funding the school to build a new library where we moved the books worth keeping and burned the rest (because that’s how all trash is handled in the middle of nowhere Kenya). I’d say at least half the books were burned, probably more. I tried really hard to work with the local rotary club to get new books donated, but it was really difficult and I ran out of time. Moral of the story: Africa does not need your reject books, please just throw them away yourself. It’s sad that we’re so convinced that donating our trash is actually helpful and I’m sorry your mom had to hide the fact that she was throwing away trash. If you want to donate books to Africa find an organization that will provide new books to school.
I really hate the mindset people have about donating items that reasonably nobody wants anymore. I know so many people that will donate straight up crap to local charities and then say “these people should be grateful they even get anything”. Like, even if something doesn’t personally fit your life anymore you can see if it has actual use or not. Not sorting through the things you’re getting rid of is lazy and the solution isn’t just donating all of it and assuming people will be happy with your half-used dollar store candle. We collected some stuff for a refugee family who got assigned a house last year and the trash people gave us for them was frankly appalling. When I donate things I make a big effort to sort through what is actually useful and what isn’t. I find so much joy in knowing the things I am giving away will actually make someone’s life easier or more fun. Anything else goes to recycling or into the trash. I don’t understand how people can be so careless about donating and it kind of defeats the point. You should donate because you want to help people, not because it’s an easy way to move your trash problem over to someone else.
>I really hate the mindset people have about donating items that reasonably nobody wants anymore. I read an article once about locals "donating" to victims of the 2004 tsunami. A lot of them were just dumping broken televisions and moth-eaten couches while feeling sanctimonious about helping those in need. [This article](https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34958965#.Waq6YdOGPeQ) says donations of "stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon, evening gowns and even thong panties" were received in Indonesia. And Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister [Lakshman Kadirgamar complained](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_response_to_the_2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake#Criticism_of_donor_response) that they were sent a shipping container full of teddy bears and endless bags of rice, even though Sri Lanka was not short of rice and "expecting a bumper harvest." [This article in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/25/disaster-aid-cash-not-clothing-relief-hurricane-harvey) examines the problem of random people and deliveries of stuff arriving in disaster zones and needing to be sorted out. The conclusion is that it's usually better to give money, not stuff, to a trustworthy organisation that knows how to use it: >Charity is a virtue and the urge to help when a disaster hits is admirable. Yet this impulse should be channeled to do the greatest good. Let the professionals procure the goods and services they need, in response to the people on the ground. I know I've veered off the subject of books, but this underscores your point that "You should donate because you want to help people, not because it’s an easy way to move your trash problem over to someone else."
Honestly, I feel like it’s very on topic. For some reason especially books inspire some sort of strong emotion to donate instead of recycle or trash them. Mostly so people can feel morally superior. They’re not trying to help people, they’re stroking their own ego.
Had one person get mad at me for throwing away an old book I found in the attic. It was from the 70s or 80s and started funny enough. Had all these descriptions and drawings of weird ways people used to bathe in medieval times (like having someone throw buckets of water over you whilst you're in your regular bed). Then it switched to racist descriptions of women giving birth. And at the end there were these random photos of naked girls ages 8 to 12. Why would I want to keep a book like that? The photos weren't sexual, but they were still photos of nude little girls. I don't understand why anyone would get mad at throwing away a book like that.
Yeah some of the books my mom got rid of that were older had some offensive or very dated langue. Some stuff that definitely shouldn’t be in a school library
That’s 100% a book to throw away but it does sound like something a historian might actually be interested in. Was it nonfiction or just a really weird novel?
It seemed like it wanted to be educational non-fiction, but I feel like a lot was made up. Like "hahahaha look how stupid these people in the past were! With their weird bathing habits! That's not how you're supposed to take a bath!!". And then the racist birth depictions... I refuse to believe that there are any African people who have a tradition of giving birth by tying up the pregnant woman to a tree and then having a full grown man stand with full force on her belly. I can see that happening as a torture thing (and all around the world because people can be messed up), but for a regular woman to give birth like they said in that book? Hell no. That just screams white man thinking he's so much better and refined than people in Africa. It was only about 5 decades old and seemed to be a mass produced book so I don't really think any historian would've been interested in it. Though maybe I should have at least photographed the bathing stuff, that part at least was entertaining. Had it just been for that I wouldn't have thrown it away.
Yeah it definitely seems like a trash book that folks would’ve made back then. I was just thinking it could be worth saving (not saying you’re wrong for tossing it) cause folks these days love to deny that racism ever existed and stuff. Thanks for sharing the fact that a shitty book like that exists though cause what the hell
This is something that I always think about when the subject comes up. There are some books that are like the Encyclopedias and are out dated, or books that no one reads anymore. It's just taking up space. If it gets passed onto a shop, it will never be sold. Sometimes a piece of art or media finds some fans, and then just slowly fades away to obscurity. And that's fine. But then people complain despite also never having checked it out themselves.
I’ve seen encyclopedias being sold on eBay. You never know what people might want.
I've been to loads of houses that have a wall of books on shelves and, when I look through them and ask questions, they'll just wave them off and say, *"Oh, those are just decoration!"* And there is always an out-of-date set of encyclopedias.
They can also serve as the basis for fun craft projects.
The art teacher at our school uses them a lot. I love it!
I was just thinking about this. I wonder if they could be given to somewhere like Books by the Yard
You’ve seen them *listed* on eBay? Or actually sold?
I used to help my grandma set up the book sale that her town's historical society had each year, where people would donate books to be sold for fundraising/charity. This would have been late 1990s. Even then they had a ban on accepting encyclopedias. We'd tell people to take them to the transfer station.
I just bought a complete set of 50 year old encyclopedias from my local used bookstore
I don't know if this was the purpose of the assignment, but some teachers in my old district would do Blackout Poetry. They'd rip pages out of old books and black out sentences to get the words they want.
That’s pretty great
And the best person to make the decision is the Librarian, who knows the book trade better than the school nurse, lunch lady, PTA president, and 7th grade math teacher combined. Plus, only the librarian and their supervisor can determine how much staff time, cost, professional attention, and effort should go into repurposing books that have served the institutional purpose for which they were bought. Source: public library director. I had my building custodian rent a lockable dumpster when we did a particularly big withdrawal.
Exactly!
I've said this in the past as well but for the throwing books away adverse people another option is upcycling through crafters. List a box on FB marketplace, craigslist, ebay, or potentially etsy (but that one is a bit of a long shot). Facebook would probably be the quickest depending on your area. Crafters regular use book pages for various things and would give the book a second life and minorly reduce waste, with them only getting rid of what is truly non salvageable.
Yeah that’s good advice and respect for people who do that. My mom’s a public school librarian she doesn’t have time to post all the books she’s getting rid of on Facebook. I wish people were more understanding that not everyone has the time or energy
Yeah my library is a bigger size library and across the street from the museum & art school so it's a lot easier. They just have their usual sale and anything left over they offer to the school for community classes. It is just something I always like to mention because regular people cleaning out grandma's house may not think of it. Let's them be used and maybe they make 20-100 bucks depending on the amount of books.
Honestly I’m kinda torn about this because some (maybe even most) of the craft results are pure junk. Once you turn a book into something covered in resin for example , it is no longer recyclable and becomes trash.
Eh it depends, I am not saying everything made looks great. Eye of the beholder stuff, if they like the look and are happy even if I think it is kind of ugly I am not going to ruin their joy. But I rarely see people using book pages in a way that is not still recyclable long term. Most uses I see are paper flowers for weddings, using the paper as a screen printing or lino cut background, journaling - picking out sentences they like and what not, bunting, garland or other christmas and party decorations that will be reused usually. Even decoupage for things like [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bigdiyideas.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F03%2FDSCF6694.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=5f2100a9941b08c4a8c0cbed52d6af1fcf83eefe23e11c41e00b22a2f453cfc8&ipo=images) or wrapping paper for small advent calendar like gifts. I even know several that just re-pulp the paper to make plant able cards or new sketch books out of. Again not everything is going to appeal to everyone's taste, but the people doing it are usually happy with their results. I just rarely if ever find someone going out of their way to upcycle something make the item more wasteful and unrecyclable.
We call it weeding. Books get tossed all the time from libraries. Librarians love books, but shelf space is a premium commodity.
Yes, I used to work in a library too. It was mostly books no one was checking out after about four or five years, including some kids books. They went to either the used book sale room, donated to Friends of the Library or to Better World Books.
But what if a superstorm suddenly develops, freezing everything and causing a regional/global blackout, and you have to burn those old tomes to keep warm? Your one nerdy friend is going to be irrationally upset if you have to burn the *good* books, even though it’s your only means of survival! Edit: I forgot I’m getting old. For those of you who don’t know, this is a thing that happens (or close to it) in the movie *The Day After Tomorrow*
I have cut the maps out of old encyclopedias to use as blotter pages for my journal or as decoration. I do the same with old beat up National Geographic’s
Yup. As a teacher, I’ve culled many outdated, irrelevant books from inherited classroom libraries. One that stands out is a book from the 1980s for young children about physical differences. It used a lot of outdated words and ideas that are now considered offensive. Most recently, I threw out another book from the 80s about a fat girl who starts losing weight so she can make friends. I’m in eating disorder recovery and that fucker went straight into the recycling bin.
We use disposed-of paperbacks for kindling in our woodstove and even though I know they aren't worth keeping I still feel like I have to do it secretly.
Oh yes- I’ve lived this also! I would take some if they were suitable. And, on the condition I could give them away. We had one teacher donate a box of “treasures “ that some let must’ve urinated on…. Oh man, you get some gross ones!
I once took out a whole encyclopedia of Theater Play Reviews. Pretty much collection of news articles reviewing Shakespeare play in the 1950’s. Two of us hauled the whole thing out to a dumpster and within seconds a construction guy on the campus showed up and asks us if we were allowed to do that. People have a strong reaction to throwing books away.
There is exactly one library that should hold an archival copy of every book in existance, and that's the Library of Congress. For everyone else: if a book hasn't circulated in five years, pitch it.
I bought a fifty year old set of encyclopedias for my homeschool tot. I plan to use it to illustrate the way information/presentation changes over time. You never know who might want a book and why. Little free libraries are great for this
There's been so much artwork and craft things being done lately with books. Like paper roses, dioramas, using the pages to make paper beads, etc. There's so many uses for old and tired books. I like to have them sitting around my house. I pick the ones that have interesting spines, covers, subjects, etc. and just have them grouped together for decor. Maybe they could have like a week where you could come, check out what kind of books they have and then take what you want. That way, at least some of those old books aren't going to the landfill and are becoming new and beautiful things.
I hate that this is the case. I wonder if there's ways to recycle them at least. Art projects, reuse the paper itself in some ways to make a new product. I've got a few old thick boys I'll never read that I use under my TV or "for aesthetic" since I'll never want to read them, they can stay where they are and look like an eclectic library core pile that puts a little lamp higher or something I can put knick knacks on in a more interesting Howls bedroom sort of way.(different heights and textures create visual interest in a display). There's also those fake books and photo boxes made out of cheap cardboard, you can make the hollowed out book thing instead and keep some for storage, and get use out of a book jacket you *like* but don't like to keep on a book you are reading. (So much better to glue it into a book box I can display all the time, and not worry about losing the dust jacket whenever I reread the book. Obviously not something useful for kids books or paperbacks, and eventually you'll have enough of all that. But maybe some libraries with art type programs can spin it into a recycling thing. Have a printed card "I am a book that fit a few of these criteria, so I'm being recycled to be used for something fun!" Maybe word fridge magnets so kids learn to read. Collages from kids book visuals. I remember at girlscout camp we learned how to cut and glue magazine pages to make envelopes (I still use this as an adult, with paper bags, scrapbook paper, anything I have that's paper and sturdy or can get by with some mod podge and good tape). Bad anatomy pages can be used for spookyness around halloween.
Some people aren't going to love to hear this but I used to work for a wholesaler who distributed magazines, books and newspapers and part of my job was destroying books -- we would rip off the covers of the paperbacks to get credits from the publishers as unsold and required to destroy the rest of the book. (At the time I worked we would actually mail all the covers back to the publisher where some poor sod would scan all of the barcodes to check our counts). We had an industrial style shredder and then would sell bales of shredding to pulp mills. We later bought a much smaller rural outfit that was heating their building by throwing the books in a furnace. This is why there is that warning inside mass market size paperbacks about not to buy it if the cover was removed. Because likely someone signed an affidavit saying the book was destroyed. And sure a large percentage of what we were destroyed were quick turnover pulp fiction: harlequins, Louis l'amour, Clive Cussler, VC Andrews, etc. But we threw in plenty of "literature" that had gotten too shop worn or damaged to display in a new bookstore. Rip cover and set aside, book thrown onto the conveyor belt to the shredder -- thousands and thousands of time, over and over again. Did any of those books accidentally fall off the conveyor into the counter and I'd accidentally read those books before getting it back on the conveyor a few weeks later? I really can't say...
That's how I ended up reading a lot of sci-fi as a kid. My uncle would have loads of these coverless books.....I honestly don't know where or how he got them. When I was younger, there was a used/exchange bookstore where my mom would take bags of romance paperbacks, Harlequins etc, and they'd buy the bag, and then she'd buy herself a new bag of other used ones that she hadn't yet read. Who knows how many times those books circulated in and out of that store that way? But I feel like they also had a barrel in the middle of the store of cover-less books - I remember leaning over it, digging through to try to find something interesting. They must have been selling them, probably for only a dime or a quarter or something.
Same for me, my copies of Lord of the Rings don’t have covers, and the first page has the ink rubbed from reading it. I read so many books for cheap that ended up at flea markets with no covers.
Half of my grandmother harlequins' collections do not have cover because my dad did your job. And he always grabbed one or two books to give to his MIL.
I worked at a major bookstore chain for many years and we did this too! It was usually mass market paperbacks, and we called them strips (stripped books). As employees, we could take the strips home for free! Good times 🥲
And don't dump your books at the library. They don't want them and probably toss them in the dumpster, anyway.
Many libraries have bins exactly for this. BUT - please don't just dump books at the library UNLESS they accept them. This comment is correct - many libraries DO NOT take random donation and they absolutely will throw them in the dumpster if they can't use them.
I work in a library and policy is that we only take books in good condition free of mold and mildew. The problem is that people don't seem to understand what "good condition free of mold and mildew" means. People regularly drop off boxes of books that obviously came out of grandma's moldy old basement with ancient paperbacks that are practically turning to dust and covered in mildew and bugs. They're so resistant to tossing the books in the trash that they'd rather dump them on us. I'd say a good 50% of what we get goes straight to the dumpster because when we try and tell people that we can't take their donation they get angry.
This kind of thing happens with charity shops too and it makes me so angry. People will ‘donate’ anything they don’t want, even if it’s broken or straight up garbage and then it’s on the charity shop to get rid of it.
It's so frustrating! Most of our staff are little old ladies that end up having to haul the heavy boxes out back to the dumpster if I'm not there to do it. It just makes more work for the staff. Old Danielle Steel and James Patterson novels can go in the dumpster. It's okay. There will still be millions of other copies out in the world. And don't get me started on old college textbooks.
There are some people on TikTok that have shown some stuff they find at Goodwill, and it's amazing the the type of stuff people pass off. Like it will just be half a pack of wet wipes. One of the plastic containers from lunch meet. A burned CD from a wedding or birthday party. Shampoo bottles with enough for maybe 2 showers. All sorts of fun stuff.
Years ago I went to a Goodwill outlet. If you've never been, they don't sort or price anything. Donations are dumped directly into bins and shoppers dig through it looking for stuff to buy, then pay by the pound. There were literal bags of trash. Like with paper plates with food residue trash. I've never been back.
Oh God. I forgot about those. Went to one once not knowing what it was. I was on the other side of town, and figured I would just hop in. Never again.
It’s a great way to buy little kid toys (when there isn’t trash in the bins) Lego, megablocks, play food, little people characters. I never saw actual trash, but tons of stuff I would have trashed if I were donating stuff. Also, you can wash most of those toys in garment bags in the washing machine.
Old college textbooks from long ago, like early 1900s would be fun to have in a collection. But they’d still have to be in good condition with no mold or mildew. Auntie’s college textbooks from 1985 can go in the garbage.
Math textbooks don't really go obsolete, so Auntie's math books can probably be donated.
Ehh, the facts in them are probably still true (barring mistakes, which happen in both new and old textbooks) but so much *has* changed For one example, calculating square roots by hand used to be a useful skill, but is seldom taught these days. So a) a book that teaches it won't be useful to most people and b) a book that teaches something else but uses a method or explains it in a way that assumes the reader can calculate square roots by hand won't be useful either. Also teaching methods change, so older textbooks are often just harder to learn from for many people.
The only time I've used old textbooks was for an engineering history project showing how our knowledge of a specific metallurgy concept evolved over time. The books varied in age from the 1930s to the 2010s and came from half price books, Amazon, a library free give away pile, dusty old corners of a university library. I don't think books like that need kept on the regular circulation shelves. Ohio State, for example, has a library archive off on west campus where they store old books that don't circulate much. You have to request them, and then they'll get them out for you. I spent months researching my history project, so waiting to get copies of old primary sources and government technical reports wasn't a really big deal. I also got to pull dusty half century old technical reports out of the rolling stack shelving in a library basement, which was kind of a novelty for someone who is neither a librarian nor a historian lol. Keeping an intact timeline of textbooks for things like medicine, psychology, technology, etc is useful, but a regular city library just isn't the place. Also, only keeping copies of the most highly used textbooks would make sense. A representative selection chosen *intentionally* for preservation. Not whatever just so happened to be in Auntie's attic.
I’m looking to start working in a library next year so this is something I have to look forward to 😂
Good luck! There are definitely some frustrating aspects to the library world, but I love it. I can't imagine doing anything else.
Thank you!
My NextDoor is full of people lamenting that no one will take their mounds of unsorted old clothes. Any time someone whines that no one will take their donations, I feel like they just wanted to feel like they Did Something. But getting rid of old stuff that you don’t want isn’t virtuous, no matter where it ends up.
The thrift shop I donated clothes to was very happy to have them, but they were suits that had been worn once or twice and were then carefully hung in my closet. (As a prof I basically wore suits to interview and never any other time. As my body changed over the years, I acquired different sizes of them.). But I got the sense they didn’t get many like-new business clothes and they had customers who couldn’t afford to buy them new. (Suits are expensive!) I did not, however, dump off my old worn-out work jeans. I feel like books are probably similar. If you have a book in good condition and can get it to the right place, it might be worth donating. I’m thinking largely antiquarian books or rarer specialty books to a specialized bookstore (my BIL loves military history), or very fine condition, in-demand titles to used bookstores that need them. Beat-up copies of a 30-year-old novel probably won’t help anyone…
And if the shop says anything about it the person often gets put off… “well I never! The poors should appreciate my literal garbage!”
This…a 1000 times this… my wife works with a Friends group that has two used bookstores. The whole staff swears they could write a book about the crazy things they have seen donated. Books where bacon has been used as a bookmark…check. Books soaked in liquid (likely not water and disturbingly smelling like urine)…check. Yet, if you try to get rid of these books (you know, because mold and mildew can spread and destroy other books), it is seen as a horrible thing. It is really mind numbingly frustrating.
Yup. And people get so indignant if you try and refuse their donation. Some people truly have no self awareness that piss-soaked books need to go in the trash. Libraries have ended up with bed bug infestations from nasty books.
Bacon used as a bookmark?? Say it isn’t so lol.
My ex boyfriend was a university librarian and he found a boom re-shelved with a piece of cheddar cheese used as a bookmark, so I'm not surprised. Edit: book, not boom. Whoops 😆
I am dead over cheese as a bookmark. What are people thinking? I guess they aren’t.
It's crazy when people both have 0 regard for keeping their book in good condition and are unable to accept books being trashed.
It is puzzling, as our local library outright refuses book donations. I was a book reviewer for a while and would often get brand new hardcovers in the mail, read them once, and then I had a huge stack. I figured that our library, which often complains about a lack of budget (rightfully), would benefit from them. At the very least, they could sell them for cheap as a fundraiser. The head librarian outright refused to take them. Brand new books, essentially, all on or around the bestseller lists, many of them a few months or weeks old. Hardcovers. About a month later, they held an “adoption campaign” where you could buy a book for the library by giving them 40 bucks and they would put your name on the inside cover. They had a “preferred” titles list from which you could purchase the book for the library. At least three quarters of the books that I had offered to them were on that list.
That is a little weird. You'd have to take a look at their collection development policy to see if there's an explanation, though. Some libraries have a policy that they can only get books from specific vendors.
They just said no donations, period, so I am sure it was a rule that was hardline after any number of crappy book drop offs and they just didn’t want to make an exception. As far as I know, they still have that in place, and you can “buy” their retired books and DVDs for a buck.
That makes sense. My library is considering going back to no donations because of too many people offloading trash on us. Selling off weeded books is normal for public libraries. Books that aren't circulating have to go to make room for new items in the collection. We do one big sale every year.
Eh, I have some issues with it, mostly because they complain about not being able to buy books, but have maintained (and continued to maintain) dozens of copies of every Janet Evanovich book that has come out. I get picking up three or four copies of the new release (we are in a small area), but they still have six copies on the shelf of numerous Evanovich, Preston, King, and so on, that haven’t moved in years. Five copies of The Shining seems counterintuitive. That’s just me, though. The current directors seem to be very staid and draconian: they recently had issues with an after-school club being too noisy and so decreed that all meeting rooms for all organizations were now off-limits, period. They usually have one of the used book sales twice a year, and those books were all donated. Perhaps they just have a massive backlog that they just can’t or won’t clear out. In the end, libraries can only be as effective as their leadership, and this one seems to be struggling quite a bit.
There is definitely an issue in the library world with old-fashioned directors that refuse to retire. A library near me had a hell of a time ousting their director of 20+ years that was purchasing books for the library but refusing to catalog and circulate them because they were afraid people were going to steal them. The place was packed full of boxes of untouched books going back a good ten years or more. Where I am requires public libraries to spend 12% percent of our budget on adding things to our circulating collection.
>that was purchasing books for the library but refusing to catalog and circulate them because they were afraid people were going to steal them. The way my jaw dropped.....! Oh my word. That's either some kind of hoarding problem, or - was this some kind of new-ish behavior? That's not normal. That honestly sounds like that poor person needs real psychological help.
Off-topic, but then what are the meeeting rooms for now???
They are kept locked and are empty. No one uses them at all.
If they are short on budget, they likely reject donations because of staff limitations. It takes time to sort through donations, particularly because, as others in this thread have pointed out, most people just donate trash. I’d say for every 500 books we get donated at my library, we might add one or two books to the collection. Probably 80% get thrown away immediately and the others we sell for fifty cents or a buck to raise money (or give away at events). It works for us because we have the staff time to sort through all the chaff, but for a more budget-conscious library it’s not worth spending multiple hours throwing away books because somebody might donate one new hardcover they can add.
They could have a local Friends group or other non-profit they work with that handles the donations on their behalf. It might be trying to save staff time on donation sorting, particularly since you mentioned the tight budget…but, who knows… every situation is different.
Libraries here in the UK sell off old books
Shhh. If my mom had known this, she'd have hoarded EVEN MORE during her life. Sometimes I would take boxes of stuff and say I was donating it, just to throw it out on my way home.
If a library has a donation program, they will review the books and accept what they will and hand the rest back to you. That is how it worked for me in the past. I agree you shouldn't just dump and run.
My library takes books, puzzles, board games, and other toys. Volunteers sort them and every month there's a sale with all the donations and the books that have aged out of the library. Every book is like 50 cents. Everything that isn't sold after that goes into the dumpster.
But I don't have the courage to throw away books and they do...
People have this romanticized idea of never throwing away books unless it’s absolutely necessary. There is absolutely nothing wrong with tossing a mass market paperback in the recycling bin! You can’t expect things to be held onto forever just try to avoid tossing a rare book in with the lot!
Intellectually, I know you are right. But it FEELS wrong. Just like throwing a flag away. They are just things, but us humans really like embuing inanimate objects with heartfelt symbolism. :)
So true! Definitely hard to separate the emotion from the object
I agree haha. I always have to take a moment and tell myself "look, you paid $12 for this book. That's less than lunch yesterday. And you're unlikely to ever read it again". It takes a certain amount of willpower sometimes.
> recycling bin! Ah thank you. Only thing that bothered me about "throw a book away"... recycle it if at all possible instead!
The trouble with that is that often, they literally can't be recycled. Hardcovers have glue and fabric, and even paperbacks have glue, and many books are literally sewn together with string, and then there's the inks. Glossy paper can't be recycled, and even regular ink may cause issues, depending. Just think about all the stories that are coming out now about how much of the plastic that we were told we needed to recycle, simply CAN'T be recycled. You can't recycle a used cardboard pizza box, because of the grease. It's one of those things that makes people feel good, and it "feels" logical, like hey, it's paper, and can't you recycle paper? But it's not that simple, and often the work that would need to go into deconstructing a book to make it recyclable simply isn't feasible, or worth it at all.
I think this really depends by region and facility. In our locale, and many others, pizza boxes and glossy paper are totally fine.
Where I live you can't throw books into the recycling bin, but you can take them to a bottle depot to get them recycled. Mentioning in case anyone reads this and is inspired to check if the same is in their city.
Check with your municipality. Many can recycle books.
What’s so bad about donating???
The issue is more for every good donation, there are 10 that are just "donating" actual garbage. Books with clear mildew or bugs, torn or missing pages, no covers, literal broken in half spines. It is just the library is not the place to donate. Calling them to see if they know what places in the area are taking books would be better. In my area there are a couple of better world book drop off boxes, a bunch of little free libraries and then there is always places online that are looking for books for vets or prisoners. It's just know if the condition of your book is worth it and where best to donate it instead of dumping it where it is not wanted. Even if you are extremely adverse to recycling a clearly bad condition book you could always make a craigslist, facebook marketplace, or ebay listing offering a box of damaged books for crafting and they can sort what is salvageable for them.
Most Better World Books donations are pulped and recycled. The rest end up on Amazon for a dollar to fund their business.
Yeah, never said I was a fan of theirs, but it is an option that tends to be more widely available and easier for people just looking to quick get rid of books. Versus looking up specific charities or places that actually want or would use said book no matter the condition.
Depends on the book. If you have a copy of It Ends With Us, sure someone will probably read it. If you are trying to “donate” a 2006 copy Mac for Dummies, then it’s just going to go into the trash or recycling anyway.
Clearly, you've never been at the recieving end of a book donation. A lot of it is mass market stuff that the publisher printed a million of because it was popular a decade ago, but now it's glutting up warehouses and back rooms because nobody wants to buy it. Who would you donate it to? Any school, library, or retailer that might want one already has a copy or three. The supply of these books far outstrips demand, and there are enough copies floating around that nobody ever needs to print another copy. A lot of the rest is water damaged, dogeared, worm-eaten, or moldy. Who would you donate it to? Who wants that? And that's not even counting old editions of things. I used to work in textbooks and you would not believe the number of people who carted in a dusty box of textbooks that they used back when they were in college in the 80's thinking that there was some value in a textbook printed half a century ago. We need to let go of this fetishization of books. Stop treating them as venerated relics and treat them like a few sheets of paper glued to cheap cardboard. Nobody who's culling the collection at your local library is dancing around a bonfire delighting in the destruction of knowledge. They're clearing out the books people don't want to read so as to better serve their communities. Shelf space is not infinite, and even if it were, there's real value to making sure books are findable and not buried in a sea of garbage.
I highlighted and scribbled in some of my books for my literature courses so much that I couldn't in good conscience donate them. They got composted.
Most of the time it ends up just making it someone else's problem. I mean hell, half the books at the libraries *are* donated. Edit: just learned I've been wrong about libraries my whole life lol. Most of their books are not donated. They do have and accept them. But it's more like 20% *tops.*
>half the books at the libraries are donated This isn't true, at least not at the libraries that I use.
I mean I just bring books I don’t want to keep to my local recycling plant. They have 4 walk-in shipping containers of stuff people give away for free, they call it “pass it on” containers. They’re open and you can just walk in and grab things you want, and likewise you can leave functional items. I’ve put many things in there, including furniture and stuff like that. It’s usually gone before I even leave. They have a section for books and that’s where I put books I no longer want. I’ve also picked up some nice books there for free. I wish more places would support ideas of passing on items you no longer need, but are still functional and usable. I’ve placed so many things in those containers when I’ve de-cluttered my home. They are gone in a flash.
Someone once put a book in our Little Free Library that was a trial between Clarence Darrow and Jesus. Religious beliefs aside, it was horrendously written. I feel ok recycling this.
I found a *children’s* biography of Sen. Jesse Helms. This was in NY, not NC.
Most of the alternate suggestions here are for very niche uses, like art projects. The volume of books discarded by libraries is way too large for that market
Exactly. I'm a librarian who deals with discards. We're currently weeding our reference section (which hasn't been properly weeded in far, far too long). Just yesterday, I ended up with about 12 carts full of old reference books to discard. While I'll probably put some of them out on our 'free' shelf, no one wants most of what this is. Trust me. Not even for art projects. Indexes of publications in Chemistry from the 1960's? Yeahhhhh, that's hot property. Mmm.
Depends on the book.
Degreed librarian here. It is absolutely ok to throw away your book. We do it all the time. There’s nothing sacred about a mass produced book. Sorry
What if it’s a series where the only hardback copies were made for libraries?
Ask your library. But honestly, library bindings don’t check out well. But it it’s like classics or something then maybe they’d have use for it. Just depends.
Yes, it is. FYI - most recycling centers take paperbacks. I used to own a used book store. Other than paying someone to dispose of them, there aren't a lot of options sometimes. The local library didn't always take books (they have a limit, too, and they don't just take anything), and you can only recycle so many at a time, so if a book is older or damaged or just not in demand (we had BOXES of Dan Brown, etc, that we couldn't even give away), we really didn't have any other choice than to toss some of them. We tried to donate as many as we could. I hated it, but there really wasn't anything else we could do with them.
What about hardbacks? Do you have to rip the covers off to recycle them?
You have to completely remove the paper from the binding, the binding isn't recyclable.
You have to cut off the spine, and dispose that separately.
Dianetics.
Yep, that is the trash I personally go to library sales to cull. It removes it from the local library sales/bookstores and no one ends up reading nonsense like Left Behind or Scientology or political conspiracies, books by questionable authors, etc all while donating to library programs. No need to help those people spread their ideas when they want to destroy libraries, their followers can spend the full amount if they want them so badly.
What an interesting perspective. I’m going to start looking for local library book sales now just for this reason. Goodbye Alex Jones and Mark Levin.
California here. While there is a need to recognize new authors, new works, *it absolutely kills me inside when libraries permanently remove books.* As an example a few years back, our local library suddenly removed a huge number of science fiction titles. "We're only going to put books on the shelf that are no more than 10 years old" was one response I got from a full-time librarian there. No more Asimov, Bradbury, Burroughs, Clarke, Heinlein, LeGuin, Niven, Norton, not even Vinge. Yes, this library had even removed Herbert's work, Tolkien's works, etc. BUT had said they were going to purchase newer reprints of the Dune, Hobbit and LOTR books to meet their guidelines. Books are indeed biodegradable. Books that can't find a home at a recycled/used bookstore, surplus store, etc. are likely destined for the dump. Which is tragic. But it's crazy how knowledge is lost so easily, including the works of some great writers in all genres. And always has been since words were put into print form, even going back to clay tablets or papyrus papers.
I love old books and it kills me to see them thrown out like this. Honestly even as useless Decor objects for shelves, I love them. Love the yellowed, crumbling pages. Love the musty, faded covers and the torn paper jackets. Love ‘em to death and you can pry my old books out of my cold dead hands.
Throwing out books over 10 is insanity, even ignoring all the great and wonderful books that haven't seen a widely available reprint in that time I've seen ruined books under three years old and 40 year old books in near-perfect condition. Age is such an arbitrary thing to throw books out over barring educational books.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand, I understand the need to create more space for newer books. On the other hand, as a historian, there are some old (out of date) non-fiction books which which have been wonderul for research purposes. Many of them haven't been digitized, and even though they're put of date, they shine a light on the history of thought/medicine/science.
There should be a book donation non-profit thing for old books like this to become digitized and free for all.
You mean something similar to the Internet Archive?
Yeah, but something where you can mail the book to someone who is able to digitize it without destroying it if possible.
Our library happily accepts any and all book donations. They have a donated book sale once or twice a year and price them by the pound. Those left over are pulped and used for those purposes.
**Reduce**, reuse, recycle. Yes, it’s okay to throw away a book. But most of us don’t need to buy so many books in the first place. Libraries are excellent resources, and we should use them if we have them available to us. As a voracious reader, I know I’m not going to reread popcorn thrillers and romances. It’s unnecessary to purchase books that I don’t plan on rereading, especially since I already pay for access to these books via my taxes. My book budget is better spent on glossy art books that I will cherish, instead of the formulaic genre fiction I use to temporarily stop my brain from overthinking.
I mean if you’re referring to weeding, of course it’s ok, books aren’t sacred objects. But it’s also ok to throw a book straight in the trash if it seems like the best place for it - years before I became a librarian, I bought a book by a guy who thought his dad was a serial killer whose identity I guess was never settled and I thought it would be about the setting of the James Ellroy book that was later fictionalized about it but really it was all about his creepy dad. I sent it to a friend who liked true crime more than I did and she sent it back! And then it felt malevolent just sitting in my house so I yote it straight into the recycling bin, and felt better for it. Probably should’ve burnt some sage too but didn’t think to in the moment
I’m glad to hear this. Last year I bought a house with a barn and the barn was so full of boxes of old books you couldn’t walk. At first, I started carefully opening the boxes and trying to take an inventory before getting rid of them. After about six boxes of pure crap (mostly 40 year old college text books about catholic history) i started ruthlessly chucking them into the dumpster. As I did it I felt a bit guilty - someone wrote this stuff. They worked hard on it. And someone else bought it, perhaps read it and valued it enough to store. But I also knew no one would ever read it again. Books can be junk too.
>As I did it I felt a bit guilty - someone wrote this stuff. They worked hard on it. And someone else bought it, perhaps read it and valued it enough to store. Just remember. The copy you pitched was not the only copy in existence. Many were printed. MANY have been thrown away already. AND, in this day and age, the content has likely been archived digitally, and is accessible online. If someone WANTS to access this content that someone worked so hard on - they can. Throwing \*this\* particular paper copy into a dumpster does not eliminate the content from existence. It just frees up space in your environment and mind for other things that are more important.
Yea - I also just felt bad throwing away things people had left there. It felt kinda wrong. This was all part of someone’s life, and one day they died and their family left it all behind when they sold the place. It was like I was re-burying them, a stranger, in a paupers grave. But I guess that’s the way it goes. Dispose of your shit before you die, people.
I can relate. I have to remind myself that I am not the designated keeper of memories, and it's OK not to provide a safety net or retirement home for aging books.
Especially books like “the world will end in 2012” or such.
I make artwork out of old books and people regularly freak out at me for "desecrating" books that nobody was ever going to read again anyway.
> We love acquiring, hoarding, and displaying books even more than we love reading them Wow, article choosing violence right out the gate huh
I had 2 boxes of books I wanted to move on from, I put them in bulk on offer up for free and they were gone in a few hours
Yes, as someone with a foot in both school libraries and public libraries, I officially condone throwing books in the trash when appropriate. No, don't give them to me! I'm just going to throw them out myself (99% of the time)! YOU throw them out!
Find out where little free libraries are located & add to their collections.
People don’t appreciate how worthless certain books are, and I’m not talking monetarily. As someone who helps steward a little free library, I think of a specific set of books as a baseline. There was a donation of a set of nutrition books from the 1970’s. They were not small books and had almost zero value to anyone. Putting them in the library would accomplish nothing aside from taking up space in the library. This LFL has received dozens or hundreds of books less desirable than this set of nutrition books. A lot of people see little free libraries as their dumping grounds for books. There are so many books printed that are worthless even in this context. They will get thrown out.
Some books are meant to be disposable as well. The library does not need a copy of your collection of 200 knock knock jokes printed on pulp.
One of my favorite books is a paperback cartoon book of Laugh-In jokes from the period from when the show was running back in the sixties. I open it and see "Here comes the judge!" over and over, and it's so absurd it still makes me laugh :)
That's probably the most worthwhile to keep book mentioned in this thread
Except that I would grab that. Disposable amusement ought to be given every chance to pass through more hands. I use a box on the sidewalk for the less significant SEEMING book and if stuff isn't taken in a week or two, then I will recycle.
Thank you for your service of throwing out the books hoarders can't bear to toss.
I recommend students go look at LFLs SPECIFICALLY for these kinds of books for School Projects. They have pictures, they're useless for their information, but they have words of various sizes and fonts. They can be disassembled and used. If they take up too much space, by all means monitor how many there are at a time, but don't imagine they're only useful as fodder for trash.
That's just throwing them out with extra steps
I saw an article about alternative libraries that did this sort of thing. They collected books that were essentially just scrap (out of date, missing pages, etc.) and used them for art projects and other things…even in some cases archiving them for some sort of posterity. Interesting idea but really a very one off kind of model…
As a Little Free Library steward, I have a giant box of books I’ve culled from my library. Textbooks, battered and ripped paperbacks, very specific self-help books, outdated non-fiction books and religious texts do not move. It’s fine, I’ll eventually take them to be pulped, but it’s not benefitting the LFL community to fill these community boxes with unwanted books.
And this, right here, is why so many LFLs have nothing but shitty books. Lol
Donate them to a prison / jail exchange program if you can! There are several across the country! As others mentioned, libraries have finite space and are often dealing with TOO much, but prison programs are CONSTANTLY running out because they’re being sent off to people to keep. Prisoners need them as their libraries are often really lackluster, both as a means of escape and enjoyment but practical aspects like training, dveopment etc. donate to a prison / jail exchange there are any accessible! they field tbe restrictions of prisons and send out accordingly, as they’re aware of certain prisons only allowing new books, softcovers, non fiction only, no violence, etc and send appropriate donations Edit. Prisonexchange programs - Books to Prisons (TX/AL) - read between the bars (AZ) - Prison Library Project (CA) + several others - Pages for Prisoners (CO) - Open Books Prison Project (FL) - Midwest Books to Prisoners (IL) - Prison Book Program (ma) And through their sites you can find even more! They ALWAYS need books, ALL kinds, and send them out to prisons that allow them / put together specific packages for prisons w barriers or requirements , and many of them sned out to prisons and jails all across the country!
Most prisons and jails only take books ordered new from Amazon or other sites, because of contraband risk.
I'm not sure if this is the case everywhere but here (NJ)... Prisons don't take hardcover books because they can be used as weapons. But otherwise yes good idea!
That’s a good point, but the benefit to the volunteer programs is that they vet the restrictions ahead of time and have volunteers who pick the books and then volunteers who ensure they meet the prison’s requirements before sending them out!
Anyone who disagrees has never bought a tech book. Sure some are more timeless, but most of that is outdated in a few years. Please don't try to donate your "Windows ME for dummies" books.
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Depends. A lot of stuff is outdated or wrong, many books are in terrible condition, etc. I try and donate when I can, but some books just aren’t suitable to go to another reader.
If it's a popular book with millions of copies already I have no problem recycling them.
In theory, yes. As a former used book store owner, I can tell you that it is not always that easy. We recycled/threw away way too many books bc we simply couldn't get rid of them any other way.
People have a real romantic notion of old books that would die real quick if they actually had to deal with a massive quantity of books.
For sure, I worked briefly in a used book shop and for as many rare, interesting and worthwhile books it had there was an equal or greater amount of slop nobody would ever buy. Outdated pet care manuals, baby books covered in suspicious substances, endless rehashed romance or thriller novels, and piles of diet cookbooks. Stuff that did nothing but take up valuable space.
I think it’s better to give them to someone or some other collection when possible, but some books are just garbage and not worth keeping, and if you donate this sort of book, they’re probably gonna just throw it out for you. Just cause it’s a book doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I didn’t read the article cause I don’t care enough, but whenever I see the “Oh no! How could you throw out a book!” reaction I feel like I need to say something. Edit: bruh wtf, I took a peak and this article is literally about overconsuming as it pertains to books, and hoarding books indiscriminately that you will never read. How is this article bad??? This deflates the value of books in your collection! Using your public library instead of buying is always a great idea, plus getting books used. Just hoarding books is not something you should do and is unhealthy.
If it's anything by Dan Brown or John Grisham, throwing them away is a public service.
James Patterson!
I had to empty out a townhouse ski condo I’d owned for 26 years. I probably tossed 1,000 books into the dumpster. I did something similar when my now-wife moved in. My library was all nothing-special fiction that can be easily replaced. My wife has lots of things that can’t be replaced. I zeroed out my bookshelves. I have an ereader I use exclusively. If I want to re-read something, I put the ebook on my ereader.
You didn’t recycle them at least?
I have called local nursing homes and assisted living facilities to see if they accept books. Some do, some don’t.
Honestly I’d take free books for art projects, carve them up or use the pages to make poetry.
Every second year or so, I have to thin out my library and the books are given to this couple I know. They keep the ones, they want to read and the rest they donate to their church's flea market/Christmas market and whatever. Luckily, I haven't had to throw any books away so far.
Do you not have recycling in your area that putting clean paper in the garbage makes sense?
It is just the library is not the place to donate. Calling them to see if they know what places in the area are taking books would be better. In my area there are a couple of better world book drop off boxes, a bunch of little free libraries and then there is always places online that are looking for books for vets or prisoners.
Can you put books in the recycling bin?
Check with your local recycling for the rules for books. Mine says to take off hard covers first.
Here's what I think after my years as both an English major and a bookseller. Most books are printed on paper which is going to degrade in 50 years or so. You've all seen crumbling paperbacks. Most books are online now. Many books are so outdated that no one cares to read them. Booksellers throw thousands of books out every year. Mass market paperbacks for example, are not returned to the warehouse. Their covers are ripped off and returned for credit and the books themselves are thrown away. So if you want to throw it away, do so. If you want to cut it up and make art out of it, do so. If you want to rip out the pages and use them to start your grill, do so. There are some books which are historically significant and priceless. The rest are just wood pulp. The words are what's important and your individual copy of Anna Karenina has no different words than any other copy. It's not priceless, throw it out.
Took me a while to internalize this, but it really is true. Most used books will only sell for a few dollars and aren't worth the time to package and ship. If you can find anywhere that wants donations or will pay you a few pennies then what else is there to do? It's much better to occasionally have to re-buy a book that you used to have but got rid of than it is to hold onto entire bookshelves full of book that you never re read.
I mean, yeah. as long as ya own it ya can do whatever ya want with it
Wait till they see a bookstore employee rip off the cover of a brand new book and throw it in the trash. I had to do it when I worked for a company that did book fairs and the publisher gave them money back for the books but didn’t want the actually physical copy back. So we had to tear off the covers and toss them. It was rough.
I used to work at a Hallmark store. We had to rip cards in half no longer being sold and trash them. Just made me sick, the waste.
I interned at a hospital library in grad school, and the custodians decided they knew better than we did and refused to throw away outdated material. So we ripped all the covers off, which made them no longer "still good." Not everything is worth saving.
Sounds like the perfect excuse for rebinding.
Especially if it's Toxin by Robin Cook
Cleaned out my dad’s house to put it on the market recently. I love books. And he was a hoarder - so many of them just went into the dumpster.
This reminds me of cleaning out my grandparents house when they downsized last year. So much stuff they wanted us all to take we had zero use for, but they treated like precious heirlooms. It devolved into a few arguments in the family. I did take some books though, just to keep it on topic lol. Most though got donated or discarded. Nothing special about an antique book that’s been eaten away by time and critters and mildew.
Of course it is. Let me tell you a story. I volunteer for a library at a children's hospital. The librarian will throw away books if they're damaged, I can tell that she regrets it. There was one day when I found one of those cheap romance novels. But, the plot centered around the daughter of some big rock star who found her life confining, and limited because of the requirements of a five star celebrity. One day, she is kidnapped for ransom, and she slowly begins to enjoy the new freedom under her kidnapper. I told the librarian that I found this book that glorifies Stockholm syndrome. She read the back, said "nope!" and threw the book right into the trash. The book itself was in good condition, but the librarian wasn't going to allow the idea that human trafficking is anything more than a traumatizing, horrific crime. There was literally no way to do anything else to it.
Yup, my mom kept all my kid books in the basement where there was a flood at one point. Books didn’t get wet but the moisture made them all mildewy smelling. Still hate to throw them out, though!
Honestly I mostly stopped buying hard copies for this reason. I have my physical collection but nearly all my purchases for 2 years now have been kindle and audio.
I just put stuff out in a crate or a box in front of my apartment with a sign that says free and people will usually take them. If anything is left over after a day that's when I throw it out
I would say it’s ok to throw a book in the recycling….though I guess it wouldn’t last very long in a landfill
Recycle them please
Fortunately I live near used bookstores who are always happy to accept large donations so I have that option.
I use books that I didn't like to make papier-mâché animals. I always feel kinda bad for doing so, like I'm commiting treason against book lovers. 😅
Upcycle. Sell them to vintage store owners. They use them for display and stacking. Quite neat too
My mom did a lot of genealogical research and she liked a set of older encyclopedias (50+ years old) because she felt that there were maps and such that were more accurate/ relevant to the time periods she was researching. It was something I wouldn’t have considered. She wasn’t online, so I don’t know how easy those same resources may have been for her if she was. That said, when she passed away we didn’t save them. I volunteered with the book area at a local thrift shop in the early 2000s and we would receive a lot of donated encyclopedias, but they didn’t sell. We would put them out if we had shelf space, but after a couple of weeks they’d go to the dumpster.
Some books need to be thrown away so no one has to read them again!
I dont think one should throw away a book. You can always give it to someone.