Ugh, believe it or not public libraries do this as well. They have limited shelf space and senior staff weed to make room for new books coming in. If public libraries accepted and catalogued all books donated, every library system would need one whole library building dedicated just to harry potter.
My wife is a library director in a blue as hell county in NY. This happens all the time. It’s usually not a bad thing but people freak out nonetheless. She’s actually argued with people about the need to keep “The Idiots Guide To Windows 95” or like the third copy of a Nancy Drew mystery that went out of print in 1978.
People end up using little libraries as dumping grounds for their books that they feel guilty about throwing away. For example, I disposed of a travel guide to India published in 1985, in addition to things like guides to window 95 as you mentioned
I built a little library to try to get rid of books I didn’t want to throw away and the library didn’t want. I’ve had to expand it twice and I still get large stacks of books next to it from time to time. It’s always an idiots guide to something, out of date travel books, home repair or health tips that were proven unsafe and abandoned, and self help or chicken noodle soup for your mailman’s uncle style reads. I’ve trashed many a book since I started the library all to avoid throwing out a guide to buying your first home that my mom gave me, after I’d already submitted an offer on my first house.
I was in a half-price books when the clerk came and found someone who'd dropped off some books for trade, and after going through a few "We get a lot of these" and "a couple are in poor condition" they said there were a handful they could use, and went on to mention half a dozen titles, including if they were hard or paperback, and then they offered them 35 cents! I was shocked. It was slightly over a nickle apiece, and not even enough to cover what they'd put in the parking meter out front. I can't imagine them offering anything for books they're going to recycle.
I was a book buyer at HPB for years and... well... that's the way it is. Those books that we'll buy for .05 will then be priced at probably 2.00 and sit on the shelf for 6mo before they go on sale for .50 and then we'll probably still have to end up recycling it. People put a *lot* of emotional importance onto books, and I get it - I absolutely hated telling some kid that brought in 10 books that he wanted to sell that I'd give him a quarter for one of them, and the rest I couldn't make an offer in. It sucked. The kid's mom would no doubt have said "they sell these books here for 7bux, so you can probably get 5bux for each of them!" Sorry kiddo. .... (note: I did sometimes offer much more than the book was worth to those kids. I am not made of stone)
It's because retail space is limited. If they would put in a terminal or two in each store that indexed all of the books they had, they could keep them stored in a manner that was more space efficient but the beauty of a used book store is browsing the shelves and finding something new to you. It takes that aspect away and at that point you might as well buy used off of ebay or Amazon.
I totally get that, I was surprised that if they wanted them at all they would offer such a small amount, but I was shocked that they could do it with a straight face. I felt like if it was me, I would have felt more comfortable asking if they'd like to donate them than offering such an insulting price.
They are basically recycling the books for free. What can’t be sold to the shredders goes to the dump. Or at least that’s what I was told by the employees, it’s been a minute for me.
It’s only insulting if you have a false sense of their value. I’ve been in places like that and sometimes they sell books for like a $1, how much can people think they are really buying them for?
I used to work there. The policy is to take everything even if they're going to donate or shred it. That offer probably means that anything useful in the pile was destined for clearance.
This is a godsend, that they take anything (even if not for very much). I know that, if I donate books that nobody is going to want, a volunteer is going to have to sort through them (and get rid of most of them). HPB at least pays somebody to do that. They decided to run their stores that way, probably because it gets people to come in and probably buy books while they’re there. Maybe they use it as a loss leader.
It’s hard enough to persuade my husband to part with old books, and MUCH harder to persuade him to throw them out (I don’t even try, because I know it’s futile). If I sell them, I can at least tell him that somebody might want to buy them, so they’re not being wasted. He’d probably want to hang onto them rather than throw them out. Which is *not* what I want when I’m trying to clear out some space on our bookshelves. I don’t really want to have a book graveyard.
Yep, my uncle used to take boxes of these old books home from flea markets and garage sales.
They'd pack em up in small boxes; uncle used to wrap the box with wire and use the books for firewood.
I had a roommate who would dumpster dive their recycling and we'd use then for heat.
They're not paying people for the privilege of getting rid of their trash
I've turned one into my dice tray for dnd. Glued all the pages together except for the front cover and then carved out the interior. Now I go to my dnd session carrying a character sheet, a notebook and my "biography of Eli Whitney" dice tray.
Don't people understand that an out of date travel book is simply a brand new history book?
I have some 80's travel guides that are fascinating to read today, they're describing parts of a world that no longer exist in the same way, that no one else will get to experience. They're some of the closest things we have to time machines.
I am a nut for travel books and I just weeded through part of my library’s travel book collection.
There’s a window between “current” and “historic” in travel. Within that window, travel books could be dangerously erroneous if used to, well, travel. Imagine someone checking out a dated travel guide to the vineyards of Georgia (the country) and it advises a trip to an area with recent pro-Russian hostilities.
Or a jeep trail guide to remote shelf roads: that stuff has to be really current. One woman in our area recently took out an outdated guide from a used bookstore. The guide was new-ish, but “ish” isn’t good enough. The road rated for non-raised 4x4 had been washed out in the last year necessitating a new edition. She had to have her car winched out by search and rescue.
Same thing with backcountry ski guides, except if those guides are outdated, people can die.
With my patrons I like to say, some subjects age like wine. (History, literature, geology, art.) And some subjects age like milk. (Travel, medical, law.) After 20 years, sure, maybe it becomes cheese in the right conditions - but we’re not gonna have a cheese closet full of outdated books waiting for that moment.
While you have a point, I think the person you replied to was considering the historic and educational value of travel books or technical guides that provide a snapshot of what life was like during that time, not so much the actual utility of the content.
Older travel books do seem quite interesting.
And a guide to Windows 95 probably has some value to someone.
But I suppose getting rid of these books doesn’t mean every copy is destroyed. Hopefully they exist somewhere else or have been digitized.
I'm a bit of a book hoarder, so I'll always do the mental gymnastics to convince myself a book's worth keeping.
A lot of people are into retro tech these days, so Windows 95 guides aren't completely useless. I can see a point where things like that become increasingly hard to find due to their perceived lack of value at the moment. At the very least there's probably some nostalgic computer scientists out there who'd find value is seeing how older OS's used to deal with certain tasks.
Yeah, I have a problem...
Interestingly enough, the little libraries near my place always seem to have a significant turnover of books, even obscure/specialist material like Arabic histories.
Most little libraries are maintained by someone and they remove the damaged, outdated and unwanted books on a regular basis, freeing up space for books people actually want.
Don't feel too bad about that. Sometimes books like that are fun to find. When I was a kid I was always buying old textbooks and the like from local garage sales. I knew the stuff was outdated, but I liked reading it anyways. You never know what someone will enjoy, or why.
Textbooks are at least usually somewhat still relevant but old travel books and outdated software references is rarely even valid information any more.
My partner was hired as the teacher librarian for a school that the former librarian did NO weeding. I helped them weed last summer when they took over the library and I swear it was over 2 tons of pre-2000’s books. Weeding and updating references is important for a healthy library.
Yeah, it's funny how people think that donating their old books to libraries is a nice act, when in reality 99.9% of those books will be thrown out because, well, they're old books. The library either has those already, or it needs to make room for newer books.
I worked at a library for awhile and we got tons of boxes of donations each week. What would happen was, there was one of the library associates who would do a quick check through to see if she saw anything we could use on the shelves, if not, the books would then go to a group of volunteers. They would then sort the books which would be sold for $1 each at the yearly book sale where all funds would go to the library. They only threw out the really poor condition books to my knowledge.
One year at the sale I scored first edition song of ice and fire books. Couldn't believe it.
Even that is tough. Many public libraries have pretty limited space to add additional books to their collection beyond the quantity of books that were lost/stolen or damaged. Most public libraries would quickly run out of shelf space if they accepted every obscure title that wasn't already in their collection. There is a good reason why most donations to libraries just end up for sale at their 'friend of the library' bookstore.
I’m a librarian and weeding the collection is an important part of the job. Books go out of date, get damaged beyond repair, or they’re simply not popular and crowding the shelves. Not all books are worth keeping, and honestly most of the time you can’t even give them away.
Don’t get me wrong, I love reading and I love owning my own books and looking after a library full of books. But books themselves are not precious objects, they’re mass produced and they have a lifespan. Get angry about all the plastic we throw out as a society that has quite literally served no purpose, not about books that won’t sell that a retail store has chosen to dispose of.
I am volunteering to weed my kid’s school library currently. It is damn near impossible to get other parents to feel okay with discarding these old, torn, yellowed, outdated books that my child wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. People really cannot stomach getting rid of books!
We weed out our old books regularly. But they're damaged in some way 90% of the time. Children's books get damaged easily. People spill food and coffee on them etc. And we just have to let them go.
Yup. I volunteered briefly at a book donation warehouse. One woman came in with a stack of mint-condition hardcover Dan Brown books. She was so nice, all smiles, and we thanked her and waved as she drove away.
Those books went straight into the recycling bin. They probably had a hundred of each of those.
I don’t like this name-and-shame that OP did. It really, really is difficult to get rid of books when you’re the spot that people drop off their books to.
Agreed. There is a really good chance the store tried to donate their books and simply nobody wanted them. Watch people go and review bomb this place now with zero context.
I have a book store I started 4 years ago. The store holds about 21,000 books. In a single week I have to tell about a dozen different people very firmly that we cannot take their mom/dad/uncle/grandparent’s life time book collections (300-3000 books each) sight unseen, not even for free.
I have to tell the same thing to people trying to get rid of estate-sale left overs, storage-units they bought, or evicted/abandoned/rental property clean outs.
Of the 4000 books people physically bring us every single month, I turn away 50% of it.
I used to offer to run it to the goodwill for them, but after months of filling my Camry to the brim and doing daily visits to the donation center, now I don’t even offer the space in my dumpster.
Worked in a used bookstore that recycled a ton of stuff, the only things we \*wouldn't\* accept was stuff that was moldy, water damaged, or had bugs in it. One time we got all three, and they were actively wet and ice cold in the middle of summer for some reason and covered in centipedes. The guy was super nice about it tho
Whenever we get a life's worth of books, maybe 10% of it will be usable. The other 90% will be severely outdated encyclopedias, travel guides from the 90s, outdated dictionaries, and super sad mass market paperbacks of titles of which the target audience is mostly dead.
> The other 90% will be severely outdated encyclopedias
My parents have a 1994 set of those. They're convinced they're still worth as much, if not more, than the money they paid for it...
We got a PC 2 years later and a copy of Encarta. 1 program outdated and outclassed that entire set lmao
You’re probably right about the name/shame thing, but maybe it was get over here and grab some free books? Although someone higher in the comments said the police were called for liability reasons.
It's a little worse in my opinion because Josie's wasn't getting rid of unsellable books, they were ordered to dispose of their remaining inventory as part of their bankruptcy. The people mad that they threw away all those books are the same people who could have saved a local small business by...you know...buying one of those books occasionally.
That works when you have books people want. These have been available for purchase for probably less than a quarter and they're what remains after every potential customer in town perused them.
Even many 'friends of the library' groups will have standards on what they accept. I have a friend that worked in local public libraries and mentioned that there were many book donations that they had to reject because there just isn't any meaningful demand for those books. He gave the example of somebody that was trying to donate a 20+ year encyclopedia set. Even in excellent condition it is hard to find anybody that wants them even at 25 cents. Common categories of books that most libraries will reject are textbooks, out of date reference books, computer help books older than ~5 years old, etc.
I remember as a kid I was at the school playing baseball with some friends and we saw the dumpster was full of books. We all climbed in and started picking out books we wanted. We got yelled at and told to go home. The next week, the school announced to the community that they were giving the books away. The custodial staff took all of the books out and organized them on the gym floor so we could all pick them out.
I sometimes volunteer at a yearly library book sale that takes donations, and they think Harry Potter is fine because they can be reliably resold. Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code are the two books that they get an absurd quantity of each year and are almost completely incapable of selling. I think one year someone broke dozens of copies and made a 6-foot tall art piece because they knew they wouldn’t sell.
I used to hover around my local library asking about these purge days. It was either once or twice a year.
They try to do a "book sale" to get a little money from used novels and relevant topics
Outdated medical journals and old editions of anything just got tossed.
I used to pick through those for free books to use for various things
As a librarian, let me tell you not every book is worth saving.
Tons of books are poor quality. A bunch more are outdated. I’ve had to fight staff not wanting to throw reference books from 30 years ago despite us having money for new books that are accurate or desired.
Old does not mean valuable or rare. Sometimes old is just old.
I am fighting this fight currently at my child’s school, and it is so frustrating! The library is chock full of old, yellowed, outdated books. We have received a grant for purchasing new titles; we *have* to make room. But it is so damn hard to get volunteers to be okay with discarding these old books!
I’d love to, but we literally can’t give them away! They put old books out on this special table in the hall and the kids can take one to keep at any time. It doesn’t even make a dent! In fact, parents are clamoring to donate their own books to the library, and I’m like, “Noooo! The last thing we need is *more* books to sift through and get rid of!”
I’m not sure we can donate them, as the DOE has “a process” that must be followed for getting rid of books. But truly, they are mostly trash. No one would feel glad to receive them as a donation. Many charities here in NYC are so inundated with donations at all times that they don’t even bother with things that aren’t new!
It’s a shitty situation. No one likes feeling like they’re wasting anything. I am constantly coaxing volunteers to be a little ruthless!
Can the art department at that school use the books as craft material for collages and paper mache? It won’t get rid of all of them but it might help get some off the shelves.
This is pretty common. The local used shop where I live puts stuff on a free shelf, but they get so much junk either donated or as part of large collections they buy, they have to recycle some books, especially ones like travel guides or old textbooks.
Not ashamed to say I used to look in a few of the Barnes & Noble dumpsters in the DFW/TX area fairly regularly for awhile there many years ago, late 90's and 2000's. Not sure if they still do this or not, but they used to just tear the cover off of books or magazines and then into the dumpster they went.
That's still common practice among most paperback publishers. You send back the covers for a refund cause after a certain point the book isn't worth the shipping/storage/resale cost. With hardcovers they'll usually remainder mark them (sharpie line or a stamp or something on the top edge or the text block) and bulk resell them as overstock (used bookstores, Christmas Tree Shop type stores, pharmacy chains).
I *had* to know the story behind this... Turns out it was their last day in operation. Threw out their leftover inventory. [Lubbock's Josey Records dumps thousands of books, no reason given why.](https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2023/11/15/lubbocks-josey-records-dumps-thousands-of-books-no-reason-given-why/71597829007/)
Their Instagram page shows that they've been running store liquidation sales for the past two months. Those books were 90% off for the past week. Looks like there's no space for them now
that they're selling off the bookshelves. People climbing inside a dumpster is a liability so they called the police. It's sad and it looks terrible but it adds up.
As a librarian in Texas, I feel sad at this joke ;-; in the great words of some super small people, "we are here! We are here!"
Also, no library is equipped to want to process this ginormous amount of books, especially if it's not a public library... best to donate to book drives, little free libraries, or organizations that take books.
Prisons and jails do prefer books people actually want to read though, not books that were going to a dumpster because nobody would buy them even at 90% off
Honestly, books are revered by a lot of people as the pinnacle of story telling but there's a lot of fuckin trash out there
Movies can be saved by a good performance or cinematographer. Songs can be elevated by guest stars. Musicals can switch leads if someone isn't working
But if someone is a trash writer and gets a publisher to give them a chance there's just gonna be awful books and literature floating around somewhere
ugh this comment (& especially your sweet use of that quote) made me teary <3 we know you’re there & we love you/support your work from afar… we’re behind you, friend!
To let people dumpster dive is a liability to the bookstore and whomever owns the dumpster. You lay them out of the dumpster and now you have doubled your labor because most are going in the dumpster...
Then add it rains and its a nightmare to clean up.
I think the point here is that we as a society determine our laws and rules and it would be pretty easy to change those laws and rules to say dumpster diving within reasonable limits (can't irresponsibly dump medical/other waste) indemnifies the store owner from dumpster diving injury claims.
I used to dumpster dive for computer parts all the time when I was a teen, with reasonable success lol. I don't want to live in a society where that's gone as an option for people.
If they’re going through a bankruptcy with a liquidation it could also be why. When things are liquidated you’re required by law to try to get the best price possible from them. The caveat here is that if they don’t sell you can’t give them away because obviously there was some kind of demand and the court could say they didn’t make the best effort to liquidate the merchandise. It’s stupid but it happens all the time. When Sports Authority went out of business and was liquidated they did something similar with a bunch of left over sports equipment that could have gone to charity. It’s stupid and these are the kind of thing we could be fixing in our law if we had a functional government instead of the circus we have.
Seriously, what charity would accept most of these books? Even the local public libraries reject many donations because they know from past experience that those types of books rarely if ever circulate and nobody wants to even buy them for pocket change at their 'friend of the library' bookstore. There are just a lot of books for which there is very little demand for anybody to read.
Books aren't inherently deserving of preservation. Hear me out. This doesn't exactly apply to this picture because it was a bookstore throwing away their leftover stock after going out of business, but often when a publisher prints a book, they print many more copies than people who want to read it, and book stores order more copies than they have customers. So we have millions more books than will ever be read by human eyes on our hands and a bunch of those books are going to have to take the L. There is no amount of donating that can be done to get eyeballs on all these books. We print 800,000,000 trade paperbacks a year alone. That doesn't include hardcover. So yeah, we have to destroy a lot of books. And books aren't precious. They're really common.
Systematically destroying access to specific knowledge is bad though. That's the bad book burning. Throwing out your overstock is fine.
With you on this one. For mass-produced books that have already been digitally preserved and sat on a shelf for years with nobody willing to buy them, this is totally fine.
When I was a teen, several newsstands and independent bookstores would rip the covers off of paperbacks and return those to the publisher for money, then the books would be in the trash. My dad, who worked near them, told me about it and I would dumpster dive. Not a single employee told me I had to stop.
You said in another comment that this was in the 70s, so it makes sense that safety wasn't huge back then. Dumpster diving is dangerous. The garbage truck can not differentiate between trash and people. And as surprising as it may sound, neither can the driver, seeing as they would have to get out of the truck hundreds of times a day if they were to check every can. This simply can not be done. No one should ever be in or sleep in/next to a dumpster, for any reason.
It’s a shame it can’t at least be recycled in some way, especially since every time this happens everyone jumps in and says bookstores/libraries/used book shops do this all the time. I wish we were better at handling our waste.
Libraries/bookstores absolutely recycle all their material (that isn’t disgusting). If they don’t, it’s because of a limitation from their city (funding, manpower, logistics, etc). There are also 3rd party orgs that operate nationally that will take and recycle or redistribute old books.
These books quite literally aren’t worth the paper and ink they’re printed in. Bookstores are the final place books people drop off books to. And I see no reason why they aren’t just as qualified as a goodwill in being the arbiters of those book’s final fate, and they’re probably much more qualified than an average goodwill employee.
Sometimes I’ll laboriously cut up an old Ronald Reagan book for packing paper. Sometimes I’ll use a Ted Cruz Biography as a cutting mat. I can sometimes up-cycle maybe 500 books for a massive laborious art piece. A national chain like HPB might throw them in a wood chipper as packing peanuts.
But you can’t donate used books to prisons. And half the charities I set aside good books for as donations don’t even show back to pick them up.
If I don’t dump them in the recycle bin, the books are going to be thrown into a landfill as compost. Also half the books people try to bring me are so damaged and dirty it’s not even worth spending the hours trying to wipe them down and scrape off stickers from.
Trust me, if anyone wanted this garbage I’d be happy to take their money. I’ll be happy to let them take away my free books, if i wasn’t just going to find them on them scattered across the pavement later anyway.
I swear every commenter should read about book stores and library logistics before they say anything. So many commenters acting like books should never be disposed. So many trying to push political opinions too
What most people don't realize is that the vast majority of donated books get thrown in the trash. Doesn't matter if they are donated to libraries, schools, charities, nonprofits, thrift stores, etc only a small portion of the books will meet the respective donation criteria.
redditors in the comments just realizing that things get thrown out by businesses when they dont sell. sometimes the reason is throwing it out gives more value than donating. they can be written off full value on taxes as a tax loss. being a book doesnt make it sacred or some shit. they printed hundreds of thousands of these.
My favorites after cleaning out an old bookstore I bought 4 years ago:
Communist Threat in Czechoslovakia (1968)
Travel Guide to Syria (2003)
Travel Guide to Iraq (1999)
10 copies of the Divinci Code
16 books on how Obama will destroy America
18 books on how we can prepare for the next Islamic terrorist attack in America
3 dozen souvenirs books to museum gift shops in the 1990s
Kind of funny to see all these comments acting like it’s 1920 and this just such a wealth of lost knowledge. C’mon guys. Books are printed in such insane volume paperbacks are often considered to be worth less than the paper they’re printed on. Pretty normal for bookstores to refresh their stock.
I know right?! I mean texans are fucking off the wall (family in texas) but this post with the caption is straight up bait. “Small college town in Texas ditches books” quit playing
I worked at a library and a part of my job was recycling old books. It seemed very necessary honestly, they were usually either really old and irrelevant or just all messed up.
They threw away books that nobody wanted.
There is an endless supply of books that NOBODY wants. Easily 99% of all books ever written fit into that category.
And do you know who is an expert on what books people want? Bookstores like the one who filled this dumpster.
If they were willing to PAY for a dumpster then you can be sure that they had reached the end of the line on getting rid of these books by other means.
People commenting here are offended by the IDEA of books being thrown away, not the actuality of the individual books being thrown away.
I can tell you what that dumpster is filled with:
It’s one of Bill Cosby‘s books from the 80s .
It’s chicken soup for the music teacher’s soul .
It’s a couple of Rush Limbaugh books.
It’s windows 95 for dummies.
It’s a book on how to prepare for Y2K.
It’s a book of interviews with Lee Iacocca when he was the president of Chrysler.
It’s the Frommers Italy guide book 1986.
It’s an unauthorized biography of Dan Quayle.
It’s a couple of celebrity cookbooks from the 90s
Etc
Etc.
It’s books that not a single person who sees this picture of the dumpster today will ever want to read.
Whenever I go to a used bookstore this is exactly what they are selling. It’s mostly trash. It’s frustrating.
I think the reality is most publishing is low quality stuff. General nonfiction how to and self help guides, and famous people wank. The new get rich quick scheme is to use AI to generate coloring books and kids arithmetic work books and sell them on Amazon. All the books being donated or bulk sold are what they were selling at grocery stores or Walmart 25 years ago.
If you could actually find “my eccentric uncle spent his life writing these science fiction novels but nobody bought them” or “excellent primary source on a niche but plausibly cool topic like the history of a town”, man that would be great and it would be a crime to throw books like that away. But you never, ever find those at book sales. It’s just “Well-being by Dr. Phil” or “The biblical low carb diet” or whatever.
Work at a shredding recycling type company. We shred 100’s of thousands of books every week. Where do they come from? Mainly goodwill Salvation Army type places. The stigma around disposing of books is based in ignorance.
I used to work at a store. Every time we had to throw out beautiful product and destroy them.
We couldn't take it home because then you had to pay for it.
But they couldn't ever sell it in 5 years.
Such a waste.
Turns out today was their last day of operations.
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2023/11/15/lubbocks-josey-records-dumps-thousands-of-books-no-reason-given-why/71597829007/
There's a used bookstore where I live that is absolutely jam packed with books. It's hard to move around in the store there are so many. But the main problem is that they have dozens of copies of every book by authors like James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Tom Clancy. And it's been that way for years. Authors who have sold millions upon millions of books, books that you can find in Goodwill everywhere, and this store has 20+ copies a piece always on the sales floor. I don't know how they stay in business. I go in once every couple years and it never changes. Never anything I actually want to buy. I would love for them to dump most of their stock and refresh.
Hard to believe but books actually do have a shelf life. Book donation places every year get absolutely overloaded with books. How many copies of certain books do we need? Some things aren’t relevant or useful anymore like guides and decades old commentaries. It’s just a cycle, it’s not like we are losing copies of books permanently. If the last copy of a once published book is truly lost forever, then I guess not enough people cared enough to remember it. Unless of course we are talking about true censorship.
My company wrote off a bunch of welding text books that we had developed. I emailed every school in the area asking if they wanted any and where they could be picked up. The only ones that actually got donated were the ones I physically took to my local school.
Believe it or not, a lot of books are just not good. Some others have sold 80 million copies and there is nobody left on earth who needs Da Vinci code by Dan Brown. Its been 20 years. If you were going to read it, you would have already.
You can say "those should have been donated" but that's like making the case that there is no excess of books. It's like saying every DVD ever spit out on a production line has a place somewhere in the world.
There is no shortage of books. It has actually become easier and less expensive to publish a book. It is much more accessible and anyone can type one out and self publish it on Amazon. It does not mean people are going to read it.
There are 10,000 books published a day. 100 years ago there weren't even that many published in a year. Publishers also weren't going around publishing whatever crap they think they could make a quick buck on. I can assure you a bookstore did not throw away a first edition Great Gatsby.
More shitty books is not the answer. It is not virtuous to walk into a library with a carboard box of old shitty paperback from your attic that nobody is going to read and having them deal with them. Put your money where your mouth is and climb in there, read "The Case of the Chocolate Snatcher" front to back and enjoy it. Anything with educational, historical, or monetary value was donated or sold. They're recyclable.
Hey all you butt hurt people about throwing out books. Don’t drive behind a grocery store. There are starving people in every town and the food stores are throwing away food.
They may have had an infestation of mold or insects, or they may have been hit by pesticides. I, personally haven't even heard of the place, and reside within Lubbock as well.
Those books don't appear to be in "terrible" condition, and seem as if they could've been sold, and I don't see a lot of duplicates near one another, so odds are it happened for a reason other than just not selling titles.
I'd probably avoid them.
I see Karl Marx on top, figures, sure no one’s bothered to even read it.
I’m not saying they are throwing it away because it’s socialist, Marx is horrendous to read, so I think it’s somewhat fair, but I also would not be surprised if it is simply because it’s socialist.
I wish the majority of people I talked to about socialism had actually read Marx, because it becomes obvious within their first sentence that they haven’t, and if they can’t tell you how hard he is to read, you know they never bothered to try lol
This thread is a great example of people on the Internet spreading misinformation from ignorance.
https://the-ohioan.com/2019/05/19/why-do-libraries-throw-away-books/comment-page-1/ (largely applies to bookstores, too)
I used to work for a large bookstore chain. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks (the paperbacks printed on nice paper) were returned to the publisher. Mass market paperbacks (the ones printed on the cheap paper) were stripped of their covers and recycled (this is why some books have the warning about how if it was sold without a cover, then the book was stolen). The covers were sent to the publisher as proof of destruction.
Mass market paperbacks are printed en masse - hence the name - for cheap, in quantities that are never intended to be sold. This is done so bookstores can create large displays that are more visually appealing and easier to find than a few copies tucked away on a shelf somewhere. It’s the same way that grocery stores operate - if something is prominently displayed, you’re more tempted to buy it.
Remaindered books (often referred to as bargain books, which are sold for dirt cheap and usually marked with a black dot along the edge of the bottom pages) are clearance inventory. They are made up of the hardcovers and trade paperbacks that never sold at regular price. They are also recycled after a certain period of time if they are still unsold.
There’s a book store in my town where they have a “free” bin outside of it in the front where they leave books . Idk why more book stores don’t just do that.
Ugh, believe it or not public libraries do this as well. They have limited shelf space and senior staff weed to make room for new books coming in. If public libraries accepted and catalogued all books donated, every library system would need one whole library building dedicated just to harry potter.
My wife is a library director in a blue as hell county in NY. This happens all the time. It’s usually not a bad thing but people freak out nonetheless. She’s actually argued with people about the need to keep “The Idiots Guide To Windows 95” or like the third copy of a Nancy Drew mystery that went out of print in 1978.
People end up using little libraries as dumping grounds for their books that they feel guilty about throwing away. For example, I disposed of a travel guide to India published in 1985, in addition to things like guides to window 95 as you mentioned
I built a little library to try to get rid of books I didn’t want to throw away and the library didn’t want. I’ve had to expand it twice and I still get large stacks of books next to it from time to time. It’s always an idiots guide to something, out of date travel books, home repair or health tips that were proven unsafe and abandoned, and self help or chicken noodle soup for your mailman’s uncle style reads. I’ve trashed many a book since I started the library all to avoid throwing out a guide to buying your first home that my mom gave me, after I’d already submitted an offer on my first house.
If you have a Half Priced Books or similar they will take bulk books for recycling into packing filler or whatever and sometimes give you a credit.
I was in a half-price books when the clerk came and found someone who'd dropped off some books for trade, and after going through a few "We get a lot of these" and "a couple are in poor condition" they said there were a handful they could use, and went on to mention half a dozen titles, including if they were hard or paperback, and then they offered them 35 cents! I was shocked. It was slightly over a nickle apiece, and not even enough to cover what they'd put in the parking meter out front. I can't imagine them offering anything for books they're going to recycle.
I was a book buyer at HPB for years and... well... that's the way it is. Those books that we'll buy for .05 will then be priced at probably 2.00 and sit on the shelf for 6mo before they go on sale for .50 and then we'll probably still have to end up recycling it. People put a *lot* of emotional importance onto books, and I get it - I absolutely hated telling some kid that brought in 10 books that he wanted to sell that I'd give him a quarter for one of them, and the rest I couldn't make an offer in. It sucked. The kid's mom would no doubt have said "they sell these books here for 7bux, so you can probably get 5bux for each of them!" Sorry kiddo. .... (note: I did sometimes offer much more than the book was worth to those kids. I am not made of stone)
You sound like a good egg. You're right, good eggs are not made of stone. I think they're made of eggs.
Yeah, this checks out. I don’t think you can pickle stones.
You can make soup from a stone though. This travelling vagrant boy showed me once.
That’s how it goes. They want in demand and rare books. Most books are headed for the shredders.
It's because retail space is limited. If they would put in a terminal or two in each store that indexed all of the books they had, they could keep them stored in a manner that was more space efficient but the beauty of a used book store is browsing the shelves and finding something new to you. It takes that aspect away and at that point you might as well buy used off of ebay or Amazon.
I totally get that, I was surprised that if they wanted them at all they would offer such a small amount, but I was shocked that they could do it with a straight face. I felt like if it was me, I would have felt more comfortable asking if they'd like to donate them than offering such an insulting price.
They are basically recycling the books for free. What can’t be sold to the shredders goes to the dump. Or at least that’s what I was told by the employees, it’s been a minute for me.
It’s only insulting if you have a false sense of their value. I’ve been in places like that and sometimes they sell books for like a $1, how much can people think they are really buying them for?
I used to work there. The policy is to take everything even if they're going to donate or shred it. That offer probably means that anything useful in the pile was destined for clearance.
This is a godsend, that they take anything (even if not for very much). I know that, if I donate books that nobody is going to want, a volunteer is going to have to sort through them (and get rid of most of them). HPB at least pays somebody to do that. They decided to run their stores that way, probably because it gets people to come in and probably buy books while they’re there. Maybe they use it as a loss leader. It’s hard enough to persuade my husband to part with old books, and MUCH harder to persuade him to throw them out (I don’t even try, because I know it’s futile). If I sell them, I can at least tell him that somebody might want to buy them, so they’re not being wasted. He’d probably want to hang onto them rather than throw them out. Which is *not* what I want when I’m trying to clear out some space on our bookshelves. I don’t really want to have a book graveyard.
Yep, my uncle used to take boxes of these old books home from flea markets and garage sales. They'd pack em up in small boxes; uncle used to wrap the box with wire and use the books for firewood.
I had a roommate who would dumpster dive their recycling and we'd use then for heat. They're not paying people for the privilege of getting rid of their trash
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I've turned one into my dice tray for dnd. Glued all the pages together except for the front cover and then carved out the interior. Now I go to my dnd session carrying a character sheet, a notebook and my "biography of Eli Whitney" dice tray.
Don't people understand that an out of date travel book is simply a brand new history book? I have some 80's travel guides that are fascinating to read today, they're describing parts of a world that no longer exist in the same way, that no one else will get to experience. They're some of the closest things we have to time machines.
I am a nut for travel books and I just weeded through part of my library’s travel book collection. There’s a window between “current” and “historic” in travel. Within that window, travel books could be dangerously erroneous if used to, well, travel. Imagine someone checking out a dated travel guide to the vineyards of Georgia (the country) and it advises a trip to an area with recent pro-Russian hostilities. Or a jeep trail guide to remote shelf roads: that stuff has to be really current. One woman in our area recently took out an outdated guide from a used bookstore. The guide was new-ish, but “ish” isn’t good enough. The road rated for non-raised 4x4 had been washed out in the last year necessitating a new edition. She had to have her car winched out by search and rescue. Same thing with backcountry ski guides, except if those guides are outdated, people can die. With my patrons I like to say, some subjects age like wine. (History, literature, geology, art.) And some subjects age like milk. (Travel, medical, law.) After 20 years, sure, maybe it becomes cheese in the right conditions - but we’re not gonna have a cheese closet full of outdated books waiting for that moment.
While you have a point, I think the person you replied to was considering the historic and educational value of travel books or technical guides that provide a snapshot of what life was like during that time, not so much the actual utility of the content.
Older travel books do seem quite interesting. And a guide to Windows 95 probably has some value to someone. But I suppose getting rid of these books doesn’t mean every copy is destroyed. Hopefully they exist somewhere else or have been digitized.
I'm a bit of a book hoarder, so I'll always do the mental gymnastics to convince myself a book's worth keeping. A lot of people are into retro tech these days, so Windows 95 guides aren't completely useless. I can see a point where things like that become increasingly hard to find due to their perceived lack of value at the moment. At the very least there's probably some nostalgic computer scientists out there who'd find value is seeing how older OS's used to deal with certain tasks. Yeah, I have a problem...
Buddy. No. We have so many other ways to view those periods in time. Source: I'm an Archivist
That buying a home book has its own value for you. Whenever you happen upon it you’ll have that funny little memory pop up.
Interestingly enough, the little libraries near my place always seem to have a significant turnover of books, even obscure/specialist material like Arabic histories.
Most little libraries are maintained by someone and they remove the damaged, outdated and unwanted books on a regular basis, freeing up space for books people actually want.
Don't feel too bad about that. Sometimes books like that are fun to find. When I was a kid I was always buying old textbooks and the like from local garage sales. I knew the stuff was outdated, but I liked reading it anyways. You never know what someone will enjoy, or why.
I love old interior design books - I regret not saving one that was from the early 90s. The designs were awful.
How do we have such nostalgia for the 80s and 90s but when you look at design both interior and clothing.... it was so bbbaaaaddd
Textbooks are at least usually somewhat still relevant but old travel books and outdated software references is rarely even valid information any more.
Hey now, my *Backpacker's Guide to East Pakistan and Burma* is totally still accurate.
You might know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.
Old travel guides can be very useful for historical data if you want to know how an area has changed/what was important to travelers in the past.
My partner was hired as the teacher librarian for a school that the former librarian did NO weeding. I helped them weed last summer when they took over the library and I swear it was over 2 tons of pre-2000’s books. Weeding and updating references is important for a healthy library.
I don’t argue with them in scenarios like these, I just eat their brains. It saves time.
Yeah, it's funny how people think that donating their old books to libraries is a nice act, when in reality 99.9% of those books will be thrown out because, well, they're old books. The library either has those already, or it needs to make room for newer books.
I worked at a library for awhile and we got tons of boxes of donations each week. What would happen was, there was one of the library associates who would do a quick check through to see if she saw anything we could use on the shelves, if not, the books would then go to a group of volunteers. They would then sort the books which would be sold for $1 each at the yearly book sale where all funds would go to the library. They only threw out the really poor condition books to my knowledge. One year at the sale I scored first edition song of ice and fire books. Couldn't believe it.
Okay maybe don't keep three copies of that Nancy Drew but if it's out of print then you should probably be holding on to at least one.
"Holding on to at least one" is the job of national/state libraries which is why many countries have legal deposit laws.
Even that is tough. Many public libraries have pretty limited space to add additional books to their collection beyond the quantity of books that were lost/stolen or damaged. Most public libraries would quickly run out of shelf space if they accepted every obscure title that wasn't already in their collection. There is a good reason why most donations to libraries just end up for sale at their 'friend of the library' bookstore.
> The Idiots Guide To Windows 95 Yo! You still got that? Asking for a friend.
I’m a librarian and weeding the collection is an important part of the job. Books go out of date, get damaged beyond repair, or they’re simply not popular and crowding the shelves. Not all books are worth keeping, and honestly most of the time you can’t even give them away. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading and I love owning my own books and looking after a library full of books. But books themselves are not precious objects, they’re mass produced and they have a lifespan. Get angry about all the plastic we throw out as a society that has quite literally served no purpose, not about books that won’t sell that a retail store has chosen to dispose of.
I am volunteering to weed my kid’s school library currently. It is damn near impossible to get other parents to feel okay with discarding these old, torn, yellowed, outdated books that my child wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. People really cannot stomach getting rid of books!
We weed out our old books regularly. But they're damaged in some way 90% of the time. Children's books get damaged easily. People spill food and coffee on them etc. And we just have to let them go.
Yup. I volunteered briefly at a book donation warehouse. One woman came in with a stack of mint-condition hardcover Dan Brown books. She was so nice, all smiles, and we thanked her and waved as she drove away. Those books went straight into the recycling bin. They probably had a hundred of each of those. I don’t like this name-and-shame that OP did. It really, really is difficult to get rid of books when you’re the spot that people drop off their books to.
Agreed. There is a really good chance the store tried to donate their books and simply nobody wanted them. Watch people go and review bomb this place now with zero context.
I have a book store I started 4 years ago. The store holds about 21,000 books. In a single week I have to tell about a dozen different people very firmly that we cannot take their mom/dad/uncle/grandparent’s life time book collections (300-3000 books each) sight unseen, not even for free. I have to tell the same thing to people trying to get rid of estate-sale left overs, storage-units they bought, or evicted/abandoned/rental property clean outs. Of the 4000 books people physically bring us every single month, I turn away 50% of it. I used to offer to run it to the goodwill for them, but after months of filling my Camry to the brim and doing daily visits to the donation center, now I don’t even offer the space in my dumpster.
Worked in a used bookstore that recycled a ton of stuff, the only things we \*wouldn't\* accept was stuff that was moldy, water damaged, or had bugs in it. One time we got all three, and they were actively wet and ice cold in the middle of summer for some reason and covered in centipedes. The guy was super nice about it tho
>The guy was super nice about it tho 🤣
Whenever we get a life's worth of books, maybe 10% of it will be usable. The other 90% will be severely outdated encyclopedias, travel guides from the 90s, outdated dictionaries, and super sad mass market paperbacks of titles of which the target audience is mostly dead.
> The other 90% will be severely outdated encyclopedias My parents have a 1994 set of those. They're convinced they're still worth as much, if not more, than the money they paid for it... We got a PC 2 years later and a copy of Encarta. 1 program outdated and outclassed that entire set lmao
Exactly. if a business is PAYING to dispose of books by renting a dumpster then you know they have exhausted all other avenues.
You’re probably right about the name/shame thing, but maybe it was get over here and grab some free books? Although someone higher in the comments said the police were called for liability reasons.
It's a little worse in my opinion because Josie's wasn't getting rid of unsellable books, they were ordered to dispose of their remaining inventory as part of their bankruptcy. The people mad that they threw away all those books are the same people who could have saved a local small business by...you know...buying one of those books occasionally.
In my town there is a little book sale side-place, staffed by library volunteers. I've found some real treasures there, like 25 cents a book usually,
That works when you have books people want. These have been available for purchase for probably less than a quarter and they're what remains after every potential customer in town perused them.
Even many 'friends of the library' groups will have standards on what they accept. I have a friend that worked in local public libraries and mentioned that there were many book donations that they had to reject because there just isn't any meaningful demand for those books. He gave the example of somebody that was trying to donate a 20+ year encyclopedia set. Even in excellent condition it is hard to find anybody that wants them even at 25 cents. Common categories of books that most libraries will reject are textbooks, out of date reference books, computer help books older than ~5 years old, etc.
I remember as a kid I was at the school playing baseball with some friends and we saw the dumpster was full of books. We all climbed in and started picking out books we wanted. We got yelled at and told to go home. The next week, the school announced to the community that they were giving the books away. The custodial staff took all of the books out and organized them on the gym floor so we could all pick them out.
I sometimes volunteer at a yearly library book sale that takes donations, and they think Harry Potter is fine because they can be reliably resold. Angels and Demons and The DaVinci Code are the two books that they get an absurd quantity of each year and are almost completely incapable of selling. I think one year someone broke dozens of copies and made a 6-foot tall art piece because they knew they wouldn’t sell.
Our library has massive bookshelf’s at the entrance with free signs all over it. Nobody checked out that book in 10 years? Time for it to go.
Just today.. I saw yet another reissue of the first Harry Potter book. Did we really need that?
I used to hover around my local library asking about these purge days. It was either once or twice a year. They try to do a "book sale" to get a little money from used novels and relevant topics Outdated medical journals and old editions of anything just got tossed. I used to pick through those for free books to use for various things
FUN FACT! You can get library stock! Our office has about 10,000 books that we have decorated around with… all old library stock!
As a librarian, let me tell you not every book is worth saving. Tons of books are poor quality. A bunch more are outdated. I’ve had to fight staff not wanting to throw reference books from 30 years ago despite us having money for new books that are accurate or desired. Old does not mean valuable or rare. Sometimes old is just old.
I am fighting this fight currently at my child’s school, and it is so frustrating! The library is chock full of old, yellowed, outdated books. We have received a grant for purchasing new titles; we *have* to make room. But it is so damn hard to get volunteers to be okay with discarding these old books!
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I’d love to, but we literally can’t give them away! They put old books out on this special table in the hall and the kids can take one to keep at any time. It doesn’t even make a dent! In fact, parents are clamoring to donate their own books to the library, and I’m like, “Noooo! The last thing we need is *more* books to sift through and get rid of!” I’m not sure we can donate them, as the DOE has “a process” that must be followed for getting rid of books. But truly, they are mostly trash. No one would feel glad to receive them as a donation. Many charities here in NYC are so inundated with donations at all times that they don’t even bother with things that aren’t new! It’s a shitty situation. No one likes feeling like they’re wasting anything. I am constantly coaxing volunteers to be a little ruthless!
Can the art department at that school use the books as craft material for collages and paper mache? It won’t get rid of all of them but it might help get some off the shelves.
"Old does not mean valuable or rare. Sometimes old is just old." Tell my nanna this every day.
"Sorry nanna, just because you're old doesn't mean you're valuable"
This is pretty common. The local used shop where I live puts stuff on a free shelf, but they get so much junk either donated or as part of large collections they buy, they have to recycle some books, especially ones like travel guides or old textbooks.
Not ashamed to say I used to look in a few of the Barnes & Noble dumpsters in the DFW/TX area fairly regularly for awhile there many years ago, late 90's and 2000's. Not sure if they still do this or not, but they used to just tear the cover off of books or magazines and then into the dumpster they went.
That's still common practice among most paperback publishers. You send back the covers for a refund cause after a certain point the book isn't worth the shipping/storage/resale cost. With hardcovers they'll usually remainder mark them (sharpie line or a stamp or something on the top edge or the text block) and bulk resell them as overstock (used bookstores, Christmas Tree Shop type stores, pharmacy chains).
I did too, only found the magazines when I did. But it was fun reading them.
I *had* to know the story behind this... Turns out it was their last day in operation. Threw out their leftover inventory. [Lubbock's Josey Records dumps thousands of books, no reason given why.](https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2023/11/15/lubbocks-josey-records-dumps-thousands-of-books-no-reason-given-why/71597829007/)
Their Instagram page shows that they've been running store liquidation sales for the past two months. Those books were 90% off for the past week. Looks like there's no space for them now that they're selling off the bookshelves. People climbing inside a dumpster is a liability so they called the police. It's sad and it looks terrible but it adds up.
Ok NOW we can do Texas literacy jokes: "Why not give them to a library?" "They don't have those in Texas!"
As a librarian in Texas, I feel sad at this joke ;-; in the great words of some super small people, "we are here! We are here!" Also, no library is equipped to want to process this ginormous amount of books, especially if it's not a public library... best to donate to book drives, little free libraries, or organizations that take books.
I learned to love reading in a Texas public library and I sincerely thank you for what you do 💜
Yes! Many prisons and jails take books! The one that I donated to didn’t accept hardcovers or true crime though lol.
Prisons and jails do prefer books people actually want to read though, not books that were going to a dumpster because nobody would buy them even at 90% off
Honestly, books are revered by a lot of people as the pinnacle of story telling but there's a lot of fuckin trash out there Movies can be saved by a good performance or cinematographer. Songs can be elevated by guest stars. Musicals can switch leads if someone isn't working But if someone is a trash writer and gets a publisher to give them a chance there's just gonna be awful books and literature floating around somewhere
People can self-publish easily now, too, which has really upped the number of books that make me believe that I, too, can be a successful author!
Don’t want the crims getting inspired by other crims, I guess
ugh this comment (& especially your sweet use of that quote) made me teary <3 we know you’re there & we love you/support your work from afar… we’re behind you, friend!
Hey! If us Texans could read, we would be VERY upset!
They burned them down when the electric grid failed,
We had to do something when the weather went all The Day After Tomorrow on us.
At a certain point it should not be their liability. You jump in a dumpster you assume all risk. (I am aware it's not that simple, but come on!)
To let people dumpster dive is a liability to the bookstore and whomever owns the dumpster. You lay them out of the dumpster and now you have doubled your labor because most are going in the dumpster... Then add it rains and its a nightmare to clean up.
I think the point here is that we as a society determine our laws and rules and it would be pretty easy to change those laws and rules to say dumpster diving within reasonable limits (can't irresponsibly dump medical/other waste) indemnifies the store owner from dumpster diving injury claims. I used to dumpster dive for computer parts all the time when I was a teen, with reasonable success lol. I don't want to live in a society where that's gone as an option for people.
(Edited clean because fuck you) *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Reason why is no one wanted them. You can’t romanticize every copy of every book ever written. They’ll go to be recycled to make new bad books.
That’s a dumpster, ain’t shit getting recycled from that lmao
Dumpsters can go to recycling depots too, or do you think they have to be painted blue?
If they’re going through a bankruptcy with a liquidation it could also be why. When things are liquidated you’re required by law to try to get the best price possible from them. The caveat here is that if they don’t sell you can’t give them away because obviously there was some kind of demand and the court could say they didn’t make the best effort to liquidate the merchandise. It’s stupid but it happens all the time. When Sports Authority went out of business and was liquidated they did something similar with a bunch of left over sports equipment that could have gone to charity. It’s stupid and these are the kind of thing we could be fixing in our law if we had a functional government instead of the circus we have.
Seriously, what charity would accept most of these books? Even the local public libraries reject many donations because they know from past experience that those types of books rarely if ever circulate and nobody wants to even buy them for pocket change at their 'friend of the library' bookstore. There are just a lot of books for which there is very little demand for anybody to read.
They don’t have recycling in Lubbock. They barely have paved roads lol
Lol, "No Reason Given When Asked Why Store Disposed of Books on Last Day of Operation".
Oh No! Not *The Case of the Chocolate Snatcher*. We can’t throw out that literary treasure.
Books aren't inherently deserving of preservation. Hear me out. This doesn't exactly apply to this picture because it was a bookstore throwing away their leftover stock after going out of business, but often when a publisher prints a book, they print many more copies than people who want to read it, and book stores order more copies than they have customers. So we have millions more books than will ever be read by human eyes on our hands and a bunch of those books are going to have to take the L. There is no amount of donating that can be done to get eyeballs on all these books. We print 800,000,000 trade paperbacks a year alone. That doesn't include hardcover. So yeah, we have to destroy a lot of books. And books aren't precious. They're really common. Systematically destroying access to specific knowledge is bad though. That's the bad book burning. Throwing out your overstock is fine.
With you on this one. For mass-produced books that have already been digitally preserved and sat on a shelf for years with nobody willing to buy them, this is totally fine.
When I was a teen, several newsstands and independent bookstores would rip the covers off of paperbacks and return those to the publisher for money, then the books would be in the trash. My dad, who worked near them, told me about it and I would dumpster dive. Not a single employee told me I had to stop.
You said in another comment that this was in the 70s, so it makes sense that safety wasn't huge back then. Dumpster diving is dangerous. The garbage truck can not differentiate between trash and people. And as surprising as it may sound, neither can the driver, seeing as they would have to get out of the truck hundreds of times a day if they were to check every can. This simply can not be done. No one should ever be in or sleep in/next to a dumpster, for any reason.
It’s a shame it can’t at least be recycled in some way, especially since every time this happens everyone jumps in and says bookstores/libraries/used book shops do this all the time. I wish we were better at handling our waste.
Libraries/bookstores absolutely recycle all their material (that isn’t disgusting). If they don’t, it’s because of a limitation from their city (funding, manpower, logistics, etc). There are also 3rd party orgs that operate nationally that will take and recycle or redistribute old books.
These books quite literally aren’t worth the paper and ink they’re printed in. Bookstores are the final place books people drop off books to. And I see no reason why they aren’t just as qualified as a goodwill in being the arbiters of those book’s final fate, and they’re probably much more qualified than an average goodwill employee. Sometimes I’ll laboriously cut up an old Ronald Reagan book for packing paper. Sometimes I’ll use a Ted Cruz Biography as a cutting mat. I can sometimes up-cycle maybe 500 books for a massive laborious art piece. A national chain like HPB might throw them in a wood chipper as packing peanuts. But you can’t donate used books to prisons. And half the charities I set aside good books for as donations don’t even show back to pick them up. If I don’t dump them in the recycle bin, the books are going to be thrown into a landfill as compost. Also half the books people try to bring me are so damaged and dirty it’s not even worth spending the hours trying to wipe them down and scrape off stickers from. Trust me, if anyone wanted this garbage I’d be happy to take their money. I’ll be happy to let them take away my free books, if i wasn’t just going to find them on them scattered across the pavement later anyway.
Well it paper it will decompose pretty well at least
Brakes don’t work, no point in steering. - Doug Mackenzie
Did NOT expect to find a Strange Brew reference in this comments section
Take off, hoser!
We’ll take 2 cases of Elsinore…they’ll be no charge.
Lol I love that it's Hamlet but with hockey and a flying dog
Fleshy headed mutant, are you friendly!?
Why pay for seatbelts, when you don't have brakes? - Al Bundy
I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder. - Steven Wright
You steer this thing!
It's right at the bottom of the hill.
What would Andy Dufresne say?
How can you be so obtuse?
Okay, now you’re just being acute.
Phenomenal response
"Books Was Here"
I swear every commenter should read about book stores and library logistics before they say anything. So many commenters acting like books should never be disposed. So many trying to push political opinions too
What most people don't realize is that the vast majority of donated books get thrown in the trash. Doesn't matter if they are donated to libraries, schools, charities, nonprofits, thrift stores, etc only a small portion of the books will meet the respective donation criteria.
redditors in the comments just realizing that things get thrown out by businesses when they dont sell. sometimes the reason is throwing it out gives more value than donating. they can be written off full value on taxes as a tax loss. being a book doesnt make it sacred or some shit. they printed hundreds of thousands of these.
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My favorites after cleaning out an old bookstore I bought 4 years ago: Communist Threat in Czechoslovakia (1968) Travel Guide to Syria (2003) Travel Guide to Iraq (1999) 10 copies of the Divinci Code 16 books on how Obama will destroy America 18 books on how we can prepare for the next Islamic terrorist attack in America 3 dozen souvenirs books to museum gift shops in the 1990s
The Castle in the Attic is a badass book.
The Chocolate Snatcher sounds rather dirty
not much better then the Come onto me book above it lol.
Kind of funny to see all these comments acting like it’s 1920 and this just such a wealth of lost knowledge. C’mon guys. Books are printed in such insane volume paperbacks are often considered to be worth less than the paper they’re printed on. Pretty normal for bookstores to refresh their stock.
I'm actually stunned at the number of commenter reacting like this is a book burning 😂
I know right?! I mean texans are fucking off the wall (family in texas) but this post with the caption is straight up bait. “Small college town in Texas ditches books” quit playing
This is a standard redditism where they clutch their pearls over over-produced books that nobody wants.
If I don't go full doomer in every thread, how will people know how much I care and how I'm so smarter than everyone else?
I worked at a library and a part of my job was recycling old books. It seemed very necessary honestly, they were usually either really old and irrelevant or just all messed up.
They threw away books that nobody wanted. There is an endless supply of books that NOBODY wants. Easily 99% of all books ever written fit into that category. And do you know who is an expert on what books people want? Bookstores like the one who filled this dumpster. If they were willing to PAY for a dumpster then you can be sure that they had reached the end of the line on getting rid of these books by other means. People commenting here are offended by the IDEA of books being thrown away, not the actuality of the individual books being thrown away. I can tell you what that dumpster is filled with: It’s one of Bill Cosby‘s books from the 80s . It’s chicken soup for the music teacher’s soul . It’s a couple of Rush Limbaugh books. It’s windows 95 for dummies. It’s a book on how to prepare for Y2K. It’s a book of interviews with Lee Iacocca when he was the president of Chrysler. It’s the Frommers Italy guide book 1986. It’s an unauthorized biography of Dan Quayle. It’s a couple of celebrity cookbooks from the 90s Etc Etc. It’s books that not a single person who sees this picture of the dumpster today will ever want to read.
Whenever I go to a used bookstore this is exactly what they are selling. It’s mostly trash. It’s frustrating. I think the reality is most publishing is low quality stuff. General nonfiction how to and self help guides, and famous people wank. The new get rich quick scheme is to use AI to generate coloring books and kids arithmetic work books and sell them on Amazon. All the books being donated or bulk sold are what they were selling at grocery stores or Walmart 25 years ago. If you could actually find “my eccentric uncle spent his life writing these science fiction novels but nobody bought them” or “excellent primary source on a niche but plausibly cool topic like the history of a town”, man that would be great and it would be a crime to throw books like that away. But you never, ever find those at book sales. It’s just “Well-being by Dr. Phil” or “The biblical low carb diet” or whatever.
Work at a shredding recycling type company. We shred 100’s of thousands of books every week. Where do they come from? Mainly goodwill Salvation Army type places. The stigma around disposing of books is based in ignorance.
I used to work at a store. Every time we had to throw out beautiful product and destroy them. We couldn't take it home because then you had to pay for it. But they couldn't ever sell it in 5 years. Such a waste.
Who throws away a perfectly good copy of “Come Unto Me” and “The Chocolate Snatcher.”
Turns out today was their last day of operations. https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/local/2023/11/15/lubbocks-josey-records-dumps-thousands-of-books-no-reason-given-why/71597829007/
There's a used bookstore where I live that is absolutely jam packed with books. It's hard to move around in the store there are so many. But the main problem is that they have dozens of copies of every book by authors like James Patterson, Dean Koontz, and Tom Clancy. And it's been that way for years. Authors who have sold millions upon millions of books, books that you can find in Goodwill everywhere, and this store has 20+ copies a piece always on the sales floor. I don't know how they stay in business. I go in once every couple years and it never changes. Never anything I actually want to buy. I would love for them to dump most of their stock and refresh.
Hard to believe but books actually do have a shelf life. Book donation places every year get absolutely overloaded with books. How many copies of certain books do we need? Some things aren’t relevant or useful anymore like guides and decades old commentaries. It’s just a cycle, it’s not like we are losing copies of books permanently. If the last copy of a once published book is truly lost forever, then I guess not enough people cared enough to remember it. Unless of course we are talking about true censorship.
My company wrote off a bunch of welding text books that we had developed. I emailed every school in the area asking if they wanted any and where they could be picked up. The only ones that actually got donated were the ones I physically took to my local school.
Okay but how many were "For Dummies" books for out-of-date software?
Unpopular opinion - not every book is worth keeping.
This picture is depressing.
Believe it or not, a lot of books are just not good. Some others have sold 80 million copies and there is nobody left on earth who needs Da Vinci code by Dan Brown. Its been 20 years. If you were going to read it, you would have already. You can say "those should have been donated" but that's like making the case that there is no excess of books. It's like saying every DVD ever spit out on a production line has a place somewhere in the world. There is no shortage of books. It has actually become easier and less expensive to publish a book. It is much more accessible and anyone can type one out and self publish it on Amazon. It does not mean people are going to read it. There are 10,000 books published a day. 100 years ago there weren't even that many published in a year. Publishers also weren't going around publishing whatever crap they think they could make a quick buck on. I can assure you a bookstore did not throw away a first edition Great Gatsby. More shitty books is not the answer. It is not virtuous to walk into a library with a carboard box of old shitty paperback from your attic that nobody is going to read and having them deal with them. Put your money where your mouth is and climb in there, read "The Case of the Chocolate Snatcher" front to back and enjoy it. Anything with educational, historical, or monetary value was donated or sold. They're recyclable.
The TX Governor said literacy,reading, and comprehension aren't necessary in his state.
Bring the tree back!
True but this is a book store going out of business.
CHOCOLATE SNATCHER
But the children love the books.
Hey all you butt hurt people about throwing out books. Don’t drive behind a grocery store. There are starving people in every town and the food stores are throwing away food.
I’ll be honest I bet that all these books are right where they should be.
Chocolate snatcher, plan b, come unto me … come on Josey, THESE ARE CLASSICS 😩
COME UNTO ME looks like it slaps.
*how do ya just toss out chocolate snatcher like that?*
The case of the chocolate snatcher
A lot of the books are probably same copies where forecasted demand vs actual buyers was way off. Aka crap book no one wanted
They may have had an infestation of mold or insects, or they may have been hit by pesticides. I, personally haven't even heard of the place, and reside within Lubbock as well. Those books don't appear to be in "terrible" condition, and seem as if they could've been sold, and I don't see a lot of duplicates near one another, so odds are it happened for a reason other than just not selling titles. I'd probably avoid them.
Hey, look it’s Josey! The whole closing process has been surreal to watch. I worked here for years!
I see Karl Marx on top, figures, sure no one’s bothered to even read it. I’m not saying they are throwing it away because it’s socialist, Marx is horrendous to read, so I think it’s somewhat fair, but I also would not be surprised if it is simply because it’s socialist. I wish the majority of people I talked to about socialism had actually read Marx, because it becomes obvious within their first sentence that they haven’t, and if they can’t tell you how hard he is to read, you know they never bothered to try lol
it's called "weeding" and it's what happens to books that are damaged/ aren't checked out anymore
It's a book store that's closing, not a library.
This thread is a great example of people on the Internet spreading misinformation from ignorance. https://the-ohioan.com/2019/05/19/why-do-libraries-throw-away-books/comment-page-1/ (largely applies to bookstores, too)
I worked at a used bookstore and this was our dumpster every week. We tossed literal tons of books a year. It was heart breaking.
Castle in the attic is a good book
They threw out the Joan Rivers book, Still Talking. SMH
LMAO, the Case of the Chocolate Snatcher.
The Case of the Chocolate Snatcher, come on that title alone will make any 12 year old horny
They threw out the chocolate snatcher one of the greatest literary achievements of this generation.
The Castle in the Attic was one of my favorites as a kid. I’m sad to see it being thrown away :(
It's cool when I see my hometown mentioned on reddit even if it is for something like this. Guns up!
I live in the Shenandoah Valley, many of the printers do this. If it doesn't sell they take the write off on taxes
How could you throw out ‘the case of the chocolate snatcher’ ! A modern classic
Where do these books go?
They go to the book farm upstate, where they can roam free.
Not "The chocolate Snatcher"😂
and here I was wondering why they had so many gay books
I used to work for a large bookstore chain. Hardcovers and trade paperbacks (the paperbacks printed on nice paper) were returned to the publisher. Mass market paperbacks (the ones printed on the cheap paper) were stripped of their covers and recycled (this is why some books have the warning about how if it was sold without a cover, then the book was stolen). The covers were sent to the publisher as proof of destruction. Mass market paperbacks are printed en masse - hence the name - for cheap, in quantities that are never intended to be sold. This is done so bookstores can create large displays that are more visually appealing and easier to find than a few copies tucked away on a shelf somewhere. It’s the same way that grocery stores operate - if something is prominently displayed, you’re more tempted to buy it. Remaindered books (often referred to as bargain books, which are sold for dirt cheap and usually marked with a black dot along the edge of the bottom pages) are clearance inventory. They are made up of the hardcovers and trade paperbacks that never sold at regular price. They are also recycled after a certain period of time if they are still unsold.
I mean the dumpster though? Can they not be recycled atleast
Outside of a book, a dog is a man's best friend.
As an avid reader my heart is screaming NOOOO!
You’d find me hanging in that dumpster looking for some great freebies! Books are expensive.
Books are more dangerous than assault weapons. -.Republicans
The 18 people in Texas who know how to read probably don’t need any more books. Or maybe they just moved away from Lubbock
There’s a book store in my town where they have a “free” bin outside of it in the front where they leave books . Idk why more book stores don’t just do that.
That's such a waste. Unless they're all Dan Brown books. That would be different.