I’ve cataloged my sf books, and am in the process of doing my magazines. I’ve got about 2650 books, and 2600 magazines so far, and I estimated I have easily 500 still to go. My wife also has a bunch of bookshelves full, and I have a few hundred non-sf books. (Hardly any.)
I use the library for most recent books, and I do get rid of non-sf books I get for Christmas unless they have some research value. But you are not going to find 1950s Galaxy’s on kindle. nor Advent books, nor most of the other stuff I have in my collection, which is heavily weighted to pre-1980 books. Plus there is a certain look to old 1950s paperbacks which you are not going to get in a Kindle, even if they were available. Not to mention that I don’t have to worry about disk crashes or format changes.
I was worried about the cost of moving them, since my next move will not be company paid. However, now there are PODs, which will do nicely. When we redid our floors I packed all my books into boxes and moved them into a POD, where they fit quite nicely. So, no problems.
Having too many books is a sign of intellect and culture. So there is no such thing as too many books, unless they are about to cave in on you.
I used to think so, when I was trying to justify having to buy yet another bookcase. And when I’d meet people who were dead stupid and ignorant but who had tons of books, I just ignored them as outliers. When I met clever, educated people with a ton of books, that reinforced my opinion.
I’ve heard that illiterate Elizabethan-era gentlemen would buy books by the yard to fill the bookshelves in their country homes - didn’t matter what the books were, so long as they were nicely leather-bound, since they couldn’t read a word of them.
I do know someone who did that. She was moving her whole family to Central Asia, so they scanned tons of their books to take along. It took a long time but now they have all their books with them wherever they go. The kids do all their school reading on the e-readers too.
She’s a big believer in e-readers as an easy and cheap way to bring more books to impoverished areas where libraries and books are scarce, much in the same way that cell phones are now so widely used in places with no land phone infrastructure.
It works much better with text books. Paperback books aren’t worth much, so fees of any amount eat into your profits considerably. If you’re selling a $100 text book, however, it’ll go like a hotcake and you’ll get thrice what the lying, cheating student bookstore is offering you! Of course, I haven’t needed to sell a text book in many years, but if you still have some that you’re saving because you’re going to brush up on your biology knowledge, selling on Amazon is ridiculously easy and will more likely result in buyers than posting flyers to telephone poles or using Craigslist. And this also assumes you didn’t finish school so long ago that your books are horribly outdated, and nobody wants them.
So in other words, there isn’t much money to be made from selling books on Amazon for most people.
Not just impoverished areas. My daughter is in a section of Germany where English books are rare and expensive, and she finds her Kindle great in being to download books from Amazon at a good price - and many free. She can even borrow ebooks from our local library. She clearly doesn’t want to accumulate books to ship across the ocean. However, she is just reading current books, not rare collectible ones.
My electronics books seem to end shortly after that Franklin chap did that kite thing. The math books suggest that anyone using algebra might be a witch and should be burned. The medical texts are pretty big on the letting of blood. Heavy sigh.
My paperbacks are the ones was hoping to find good homes for. (Notice I didn’t mention any textbooks about grammar.) Another heavy sigh.
Unless they are rare books, out of print, or very expensive for some reason, throw them away. They are just books. If you can readily find someone who wants them, or you can exchange them for something else, fine. But otherwise they are just paper, and this is the 21st century, books are readily available.
Almost all of my books are out of print. But they’re not particularly rare unless you’re that person who just happens to be looking for something I have.
“Throw them away?” Never. I’ll donate them somewhere first rather than fill the recycle bin.
I can understand the OPs (and probably several other posters) problem if you have any unusual tastes and therefore can’t just borrow your books from the local library.
So let me recommend the third option besides donating to charity or selling on amazon:
bookcrossing - each book is registered with an unique ID and either released in the wild or sent to somebody who wishes for it. You can leave an entry on how you liked the book (like a book club), start your own wishlist (for those rare books your library doesn’t have) or start rings/ boxes with a specific theme.
In addition, you can use trading sites like paperbookswap or bookmooch and so on, which also have wishlists. True, your wishes won’t be granted immediatly like in a shop (though if you prefer older books, trying to find those is also time-consuming) but it can also be much more of a surprise, suddenly, a parcel arrives with a book you wished for one year ago!
I have hundreds, not thousands, but I live in an apartment. I had books piled on the floor from lack of shelving. I carted in some books to my school and set up a free table for students. I have more to give, but it was really hard. I try to look at it this way: unless it has some serious significance (like my Joy Luck Club or Huckleberry Finn or something from HS that I adored) I can get rid of it. It’s nice to share that happiness. For my non fiction, I’m giving some to my son’s library (well, the middle/high school) and putting a few ads on CL for some people to come get more for a cheap price. But after the initial shock, it felt REALLY GOOD to see students reading books.
If I had a house, I probably wouldn’t be doing this at all! But perhaps you can make a design or architechtural statement out of it?