I’ve been purging my books for awhile now, I’ve got to many and I’ll never reread them so I donate most of them. However, for 10-15 years I was buying a lot of HB books, mostly between 1990-2005 or so. Most of them are Steven King, Koontz, Danial Silva and those kinds of at least semi popular books. I really don’t want them any more as they take up space and I’m tired of moving them and I could use the room for newer books.
I just don’t know how to get rid of them. Are they even worth trying to sell? Should I do it on eBay, in lots, or just haul them all down to the used book store? Is there a quick way to see if any of them are worth anything, which is doubtful given the time period.
Probably not worth much – and is it worth your time to haul them to a used bookstore, only to get a $1 or $2 each on them? I can’t tell you how many friends I have helped do this and the time it takes the bookstore buyer to go through them to find the one or two gems only to have you haul them back afterward to me seems a great waste of time.
I’d donate them; then you are only hauling them to one place and getting a break on your taxes.
If the used book store takes them at all, you’d be looking at $1 a book at best (more likely, if they took them all, they’d offer you a price that averaged out to a quarter a book). You’d be better off donating them to your local library, where they’ll get sold in the library book sale and the money will be used to buy new materials or improve the building/infrastructure.
Last year, I sold all of my Stephen King hardback books on eBay for a total of about $75. (Buyer paid for shipping costs, of course; I shipped via media mail, which is the cheapest option.) It was about 25 books, so not really a huge amount per book, but still, better than nothing.
I’d check eBay to see what lots of books by those authors are going for, and if it’s worthwhile, go ahead and sell them there. Otherwise, take the tax break from donating them to Goodwill or wherever.
Edited to add: I just checked my records. It was actually 18 books.
I think that only really works with Stephen King, where there’s a huge collector’s market for the original hardbacks. Dean Koontz, as much as I like him, not so much.
I’d go so far as to say popular books by the likes of King, Koontz, Clancy, Crichton, etc. are essentially worthless. Go to any library used book sale and you’ll find boxes of unsold copies. You may find someone willing to throw you a buck or two, but that’s pretty rare and you’ll have to deal with the hassle of shipping and eBay.
Similarly, I just went through a box of old books and discovered my entire Hardy Boy collection from the late 80s. I have probably 60 or 70 books but looking on eBay and AbeBooks, these just aren’t worth anything. I’m going to just give them to a library book sale, though I doubt they’ll even find a buyer there.
Pretty much everything sells at a library book sale. Except for political screeds more than three years old, Jurassic Park (everyone that wants one likely has two), old business books and old computer books. Also, biographies of people who were famous for about three seconds twenty years ago.
What about signed books? I have a couple that were signed, but sold that way, not something I did at a book signing. They have a sticker on the front that says signed by the author.
Though it would be nice to get some money, to buy some Kindle books.
My first stop on the road to responsible book disposal is a large, conveniently located used book store. I’d skip this step if it weren’t so close to my home and didn’t have ample free parking. They often won’t accept half of what I’ve brought. For what they will take I choose store credit over cash, perpetuating the problem of what to do with books.
In our area (Baltimore, MD) there is a great organization called The Baltimore Book Thing. It’s essentially a free book exchange. Open stacks of donated books are available free to anyone who’d like them. They are stamped on the inside that they are not to be resold. Perhaps there’s something similar in your community.
For books that are speciallized or rare(ish) I’ve been using Book Mooch. You are responsible for the cost of shipping. If you aren’t planning to acquire books through them you’ll be operating at a loss, but it does provide some assurance that the more specialized books in your collection will get into hands of other folks who really want them. If you accumulate points, but don’t want to “mooch” books you can donate your collected “points” to charities including libraries.
You might also see if there’s a Book Crossing location near you.
Our county jail accepts book donations thought the volunteer office, and so do hospitals.
You can check those to see whether the signatue increases the value. A sticker might mean that the author signed them at a book signing in a bookstore, so they’d be at least somewhat rare that way. Bookfinder.com is a great metasite that searches many online used book databases simultaneously, and you can set it to search only for signed books.
Some libraries - certainly not all - will give you a slip indicating that you made a charitable donation. If you itemize your taxes you can apply it. How do you know how much to put on the slip? What you think the books are worth or whatever won’t raise a flag for the IRS.
The other good thing about donating them to a library is that some people can only afford books from a library book sale. My local library charges a dollar for hardcover and fifty cents for paperbacks.
If you drop them off at the library for their book sale, at least you’ll get them out of the house - let the library do whatever they want with them, sell, put on their shelves, or give to the recycling.
In our county, there is a once-a-year event where the public is invited to take all their old books (books only) to a location where the books will be ground up for recycling. When word of this got out, an uproar went up - Save The Books! - and people protested so loudly that groups organized to be there to sort out the good from the bad on the day of the event. So good books found a new home and the junk went into the grinder.
You can put them on www.paperbackswap.com and trade them for books you want to read. I frequently look for hardback books on the swap to complete some collections I have. For instance, do you have any hard back John D. MacDonald Travis McGee books? I’m missing a couple.
That is awesome. I’ve never heard about such a thing anywhere I live, but I’d use it if I did.
When we cleared out some books we donated them to the library, which wasn’t all that thrilled. We do try to sell some with limited success. We have not donated to charity related thrift stores, but we do have one close by with a lot of books, and judging by their selection and turnover I suspect they’d be happy to get old popular ones.
Take them to your local domestic violence shelter. They’ll likely be glad to get them, may be willing to give you a generous estimate on the value of your donation for tax purposes, and if there’s such a thing as karma, you might get a little of the good kind on your side of the scale for the act.
As other people have said, you should donate the books to charity. Keep in mind that even charities don’t want certain sorts of books, since nobody wants to buy them even when they cost almost nothing. First, don’t try to donate magazines. Nobody wants them. They certainly don’t want your lifetime collection of National Geographics. Second, don’t try to donate encyclopedias. If they are fairly new or so incredibly old that they are quite rare it’s just possible that someone might want them, but most sets of encyclopedias that are donated are somewhere in the middle and useless to everybody. Third, don’t donate textbooks unless they are the newest editions of those books. Fourth, don’t donate books that are falling to pieces unless they are rare books.
You might want to donate the signed books too if the charity can handle them separately. Where do you live? I donate books to the Stone Ridge Book Sale, which is probably the best charity book sale in the Washington, D.C. area. They have display cases for the really rare (and sometimes signed) books and separate tables for signed copies of more common books. They can also handle rare books, although I’ve never given such books to them. Also, many charities with book sales also accept DVD’s and CD’s. Some of them will also take records, cassettes, and videocassettes.
The Salvation Army takes anything you bring them. We donated somewhere around 15 boxes of books when we moved. Even old textbooks, etc. They take it all.
I have been trying to build my collection of HB books for a year now. I have given so many books away in my life and now I regret it so I have been buying my favorites back in Hardcover on amazon and ebay. I will say that I usually are able to pick lots up for what amounts to two to three bucks a book on ebay including shipping but hey, if you have lots, that is money in your pocket.
Of couse I’ll be happy to take many of them off your hands for the price of shipping.
