Our thrift stores take books, in part because taking pretty much everything gets them high on the list for people to give them things. A friend used to manage a thrift store and if you get picky about what you take, people don’t tend to give you their stuff.
Some of them do get tossed, but you are not the one tossing them, so you don’t get the guilt. You can believe your books found a good home, sort of like when your mom said the dog went to live on a farm…
Well, the thrift stores that don’t want a lot of books in general are run by the Rescue Mission or Salvation Army and they want only good clean wholesome stuff - that, and because people tend to dump things like mildewed old encyclopedias that the thrift stores then have to pay to be disposed of.
The county has, once a year, a special recycling event at a transfer station where the public is invited to bring and dispose of unwanted books. It’s kind of funny, because booklovers everywhere gasped in horror! You’d think the county had arranged an Unwanted Pet drive instead of mildewy old copies of Stephen King and John Grisham! Groups were rallied to get there early to sort through the mountain of stuff for hidden treasure before it went into the grinder, and of course they saved many interesting and valuable things that were just being thrown away.