My wife and I have a lot of college textbooks, mostly science/engineering, circa '93-'06. (And a few much older inherited from others). With everything going digital, I doubt there’s much demand for them, but I feel there’s got to be some use to put them towards. I tried sellbackyourbook.com, but most are coming up $0 there. I see some of them on ebay, but mostly newer editions of them. If the 11th edition is selling for $30, I don’t think I’ll get much for the 4th edition. I’d be happy to donate them, just to get them out of the house and hopefully to someone that can use them, but I don’t even know who would take them as donations. Just seems like a huge waste to throw them in the recycling bin.
If there is somewhere that handles paper recycling, take them there. Otherwise straight to the landfill. I’ve been slowly clearing out all the reference books from my classroom and there is absolutely zero value in old textbooks. Trash them and don’t feel bad about it.
When we helped to clean out my parents’ borderline-hoarding house about 5 years ago… They had a massive amount of books. I dug online to see what to do with used books. Most used bookstores would not accept hard cover mass-market fiction bestsellers (i.e. not genre like Sci-Fi or mystery). People tend to prefer paperback in the used market. I assume the same applies to previous editions of textbooks - they are pretty much useless. Recycle.
(most places nowadays have recycle programs alongside waste disposal).
i still have university textbooks from the 70’s - average price $10 to $25 - and the 80’s - $50 to $80. My wife took some accounting courses a few years ago, the book set was $300 - fortunately reimbursable through work.
My mother has been slowly going through the lawbooks and other textbooks my father accumulated over thirty years of teaching. Even the newest ones are a couple of decades old, so few are still worth anything. She’s been putting a few each week in the recycling container that’s picked up at the curb. The first week, the guy on the truck was picking up the recycling bin with the mechanical arm when he stopped it and lowered the container. Apparently it alerted him to the unusually large weight and he opened the lid to investigate.
I learned something about recycling books a few years ago. At an estate sale, I made an offer for what I thought was all the books on a bookshelf. Turned out it was every book in the house. I ended up with over 2000 books. Sold a couple on Ebay, the rest were worthless. Entire books are not recyclable and if found in the recycling stream, they will be pulled out and tossed in the trash. Only the paper pages are recyclable, the covers and binding are not. My ex BIL and I spent 4 hours cutting the spines off all the books with a bandsaw. I saved all the pages that were made from paper that could be reused by a friend that makes paper in her home. The rest went to a recycling facility, that filled the bed of a full size pickup. It cost me almost $50 to dump covers and bindings at a garbage dump.
Check around at your closest university for textbook drives to send them to under-resourced countries. When I was volunteering in Cambodia, the word was, “We’d love new textbooks but we can use anything, so please pack up an extra suitcase of books!”
Public libraries recycle books a lot, as you can imagine. Maybe your local library has an arrangement with a nearby recycler to process their unwanted books, and either the library or that recycler might be willing to take yours.
I work part-time for my university’s surplus and recycling department, and we take entire gaylords (~27 cu. ft. containers) of books from both the local city library and our university’s library to a processor 1-2 times a week. The processor accepts both hardcover and paperback books.
Lastly, depending on the particular topic of your textbooks, they might still have resale value. Topics like calculus and statics haven’t changed hardly at all in the last 20 years so just as a source of information they might still have some value to someone.
It’s been a long time but I used to have an online book store and I would periodically clear out and take a loss on excess inventory at one of those used book stores that buy used books. The one closest to me shut down but they still exist. You could bring in all your books, they would make an offer on any they wanted and they would handle the disposal of the rest. So even if you didn’t particularly want to sell or make money, they would take them all off your hands.
You can sell books individually on Amazon. Search each by the ISBN number. While I agree that the vast majority won’t be worth selling, you might find exceptions.
You can also donate books to Friends of the local library for their booksale (although with Covid few are currently doing booksales).
When I looked through my old collection, I found several that fit in with the local mini-library scene. Godel Escher and Bach was gone in a day. Rise and fall of the Roman empire met a similar fate.Severel Bertrand Russell’s and a Science of bread making went fast, as did gardening books. Shorts by Twain took a couple Months.
People are looking for stuff beyond children’s books. Even my History of Ireland got snatched up.
You don’t recycle, donate or sell old college textbooks! You keep them forever! Clogging up and/or requiring extra bookcases and weighing down countless back-breakingly heavy boxes in every household move. Extra points if you never, ever open them after college and leave them intact and only barely used to your eventual heirs. Who can then pour over them to laugh at all the old, outdated and just plain wrong information in them.
Does your area have a sheltered workshop where people with mental and/or intellectual disabilities work? Some of them process books for recycling, and then sell the paper and use it to fund the programs. Obviously, this is done by the higher-functioning people. Give them a call; the worst thing they can do is say they don’t do it and don’t know of any place that does.
The library I volunteer at (or did in better times) got a lot of vintage textbooks. Some we recycled, some we sent to a reseller (specifically, Better World Books, which sold the books themselves and sent us a percentage) and others we did put out in the store, usually math books or children’s textbooks, or occasionally books that had interesting cover graphics.
I’m not sure how any of them would have fared with covid impacting international freight and distribution. And they are probably hoping for monetary donations so they can buy the most appropriate books rather than hoping your old accounting textbook fills their need.
If you are down-sizing a technical library that isn’t intrinsically going out of date, its still a good option.
You might start by finding out if there is a store that buys old textbooks that’s near you. Many large universities have such a store. They then sell or rent them to other students at the university. They might also buy any other books you want to get rid of (but not for very much). The store might say that they don’t want your textbooks because they are no longer used for any course, but it’s worth trying.
Old textbooks are about as close to beings undisposable as a book can get. Places like used bookstores or libraries won’t even take them as free donations because they don’t sell.
If you can find somebody who will take them off your hands for free, jump on the opportunity.
But once Covid is over, you will no longer need that backdrop of crammed bookshelves behind you for Zoom calls. Then you’re back to the question of how to dispose of them.
Apparently now a some textbooks are actually also online books which include a special code to access online “workbooks”. Since the code can’t be reused and expires at the end of the term, everything has to be bought new. Before that, textbooks were “revised” every few years, meaning they usually just altered or shuffled around the problems at the end of each chapter so you could not follow the course without buying a new revised copy.
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