I would like to offer that your local VFW would definitely accept your donation of books. My VFW post in NM collects them and then distributes them to both homebound disabled vets or at the VA hospital in Albuquerque. The Ladies Auxiliary will also sometimes add a book in the care packages which are sent to the troops all over the world. When you are out in the field having something to take your mind away from what you have to deal with everyday even if it is only for a few moments is a great thing.
Libraries in our area do annual book sales. Some of the books they sell are old library inventory, some are donated by people looking to get rid of their old books. You won’t make any money, but at least some of your books will find new homes. This is a very good way to get rid of older novels, etc.
Totally agree about the short lifespan of bestsellers, the total worthlessness of textbooks, etc.
How about an SDMB book exchange? If you’re going to just get rid of them anyhow, how about sending them to a fellow doper for the cost of shipping at the ridiculously low USPS book shipping rate?
List your books here! I want paperbacks. Try to send a bundh of books in the same box somehow.
You could make sure that the books go to someone that really wants them through your local Philadelphia Freecycle Network.
The Op wants to get rid of them, thus Craigslist and similar is a bad idea. Takes a lot of time and energy, and you get weirdos.
Try a used book store, then donate the rest.
When I moved a year ago I found out that I had around 5000 books. I am sorry to report that the vast majority of them were trashy novels. About 1000 of them were (are) really old sci-fi novels that originally cost 50 cents or less. More than 500 of them are mystery hardbacks from 2004, when I was a reader for MWA’s Edgar awards. (My dream come true, every day the UPS guy arriving with boxes of mysteries to read. Be careful what you pray for.)
Apparently, I have never been able to throw a book away in my life. I am pleased to report that, while moving, I managed to throw away quite a few useless old textbooks, like my husband’s high-school biology workbook, my moth-eaten French textbook (from 8th grade!), and a bunch of books I had to buy in graduate school. I feel kind of bad about throwing books away, but after several weeks of packing I got over it. Seriously, nobody else in the world wants my notated copy of Ancient English Verse Romances.
I sorted them into boxes marked KEEP and GIVE AWAY. The KEEP boxes are awaiting the fine bookshelves my husband is someday going to build in our basement. They are vastly outnumbered by the other boxes.
I put some in every box I give to ARC or Goodwill. I gave about 20 boxes to a woman who takes them to prisons. (For that one, I tried to avoid the mysteries and stuck to stuff that might provide educational worth.) I also gave her three boxes full of magazines dating back to approximately 1982.
I asked here if anyone wanted free books and nobody bit. Too late now.* I also listed some on a couple of mystery writer lists and got some takers there, so that was good.
I sold some of them on eBay, where I noted that, at one time, I could have probably got $50 for A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, if I wanted to give it up (which I don’t). But eBay is too much work for the amount of money you end up getting, and amazon.com doesn’t give you enough of an allowance for postage. (It’s enough if you send it media mail, but that entails a trip to the PO.) I gave a bunch of them to the library for its annual book sale (or ongoing book sale, I don’t care which). I still have thousands of books left, but they’re on their way out, honest they are. Meanwhile I keep acquiring more. That has to stop!
*Well, not really. I just don’t feel like posting a list. Maybe later.
There are way too many to list – seriously, I’d guess 40 boxes worth. (I’ve been in this house 19 years.)
I need to get rid of them in batches, not one at a time. I think I’m going to divide them into three groups (from smallest to largest): worth trying to sell (used book dealer; Amazon); worth finding a good home for (donating to a charity that gets them directly to readers – thanks for the Magee tip, rocking chair); charity that will sell them or whatever (here in Philly, that would be the Whosoever Mission).
If someone wants to organize an SDMB book exchange, though, I could throw a few in that direction …
Hakuna, I’m also a person who loves to read, but doesn’t keep many books. Even the ones I keep don’t get re-read for years on end, maybe never at all. However, when my kids complain of boredom, I have something on hand for them to read that I can recommend wholeheartedly.
I do keep my librarians hopping!
Don’t forget the “throw out because no one will want it/it’s too damaged or fragile” category.
Unfortunately a lot of the books I want to get rid of will fall into that category - I have a lot of cookbooks (that are not out of print), and pretty much no local charity wants these. I don’t have time or inclination to sell them online and don’t want to deal with Craigslist.
Really? I always see old cookbooks at Goodwill and the Salvation Army stores. I collect old cookbooks, and they’re the best place to find them.
You could try “Freecycle” it’s a place where you advertise things to give away locally in your area.
If you go into the www.bookcrossing.com forums, there may be a regular meetup of Bookcrossers in your area, where, if you post and ask before, you can came and drop one box of books to donate for bookcrossing (those that are hard to get rid off at the other places), or you could simply post directly in the forums offering x number of boxes full of books as surprise. Many bookcrossers get books donated by people who know about bookcrossing but don’t have the time/energy/internet interest to do it themselves.
I don’t have either of those near me. The groups that will come to my house and pick them up, or the ones that have collection centers nearby, pretty much just want fiction, maybe history non-fiction, that kind of thing.
wow–a kindred soul! 
I tell you in my thread on this at the Giraffe Board I was clearly in the minority on it. People told me they kept their old books so that they could re-read them, etc. But damn there are sooooo many books out there in the world that it just made no sense to me. Who has time to re-read a book when there are so many new books to read? My gut feeling is that they enjoyed the book, paid for it and the thought of giving it away was hard to deal with, so they say they are keeping it in case they want to read it again some night. I know a few also had very specific genres that they liked with only a few authors they enjoyed. For me I love a wide vareity of genres and authors, so many in fact that I doubt in my life I can finish the books right now I would like to read, let alone all the new books coming out. But I am not a hoarder or a collector and the thought of doing what the OP is now doing would scare me off from keeping them.
You could also donate the books to the Baltimore Book Thing, which basically just gives out free books.
Cookbooks are the best sellers at my library’s ongoing book sale. They never last more than a day or two.
You what doesn’t sell? Jurassic Park. A copy of JP (or The Lost World) gets donated practically once a week and they never sell. I have no idea where they’re all coming from.
Huh. I’ll double-check with ours before I pull the trigger, I guess.
My wife is the same way about printed matter. It killed her to get rid of much of that load, but there are another 20 boxes to keep her tactile-y happy for many years. For me, between Kindle and the Internet, I don’t have much use for the printed form anymore. There are some exceptions, of course.
Depending on what kind of books you’ve got, you could donate them to Books Through Bars, which distributes books to prisons.
Yes, cookbooks were very popular when I worked in a used bookstore. As were craft books, self-help books and religious books. I was surprised to see how well older out-of-print self-help books sold. Someone commented to me that her copy of whatever it was had been damaged, and she was really happy to be able to get another copy because it was important to her.
We sold virtually no Harlequins and similar romances. Our minimum book price was $2, and while people may snap 'em up for a dime apiece, nobody want’s to pay 2 bucks for one.