Re: selling books on eBay/Amazon:
Seeing as I both have lots of books I will no longer read, AND I’m short on money right now, this seems idea for me (and Hell, even if I only make $1-$2, that could still easily be enough for a month’s worth of food, or a student loan or CC payment.)
However, one question: shipping. Is it enough to just wrap a book up in some brown paper and send it off, or does it need to be in a box or something?
Whatever you can get the post office to accept. And you generally send the books “media mail” which is ridiculously cheap (and covered by the buyer). I have large manila envelopes that I bought in bulk a while back. They handle the majority of my book shipping needs.
Why destroy something that someone else might want, add to landfill/pollution, etc. when there are so many other viable alternatives?
Why would he do that? Probably cared for, books have a shelf life (heh) of 100-200 years (more if you really make an effort at it). Why destroy something that could be passed to a bunch of other people and be useful for a long long time?
It’s hard, even when you know that the book isn’t rare, or if the book isn’t very good. You’re thinking someone might be looking for this book!
I’ve thrown a few books away – paperbacks that are falling apart and crappy books that I got in blind trades. I used to take books to work and leave them in the cafeteria. Now I donate them to the library, or offer them to my on-line book group, or just give them to friends.
The OP stated:
Well, I assume he’s not a sock for the Library of Congress, and thus is not bound by some sort of law that prevents him from throwing books away. I also question just how much money can be made from the average person’s unwanted books, I assume (again) we’re not talking a Ben-Hur 1860, Third Edition with a duplicated line on page one-sixteen? Or a Chevalier Audubon 1840? In which case how much time does this selling of books take? My old books would fetch, maybe 5 dollars. It would take me 1-2 hours to get that money, maybe more. Not worth it.
Sure somebody might want them, or they might not. Why agonize about it and possibly hoard books?
Is it worth it?
Speaking as someone who works in a librarian, we will take practically any book donations (but a pox on your Reader’s Digest condensed books, NO ONE wants them). A dollar here and a dollar there and it starts turning into real money real fast.
And if the books are in good shape some of them might even be added to the collection.
Basically, libraries need all the help they can get, so why throw books away when they would be very useful to us?
Missed the edit window…
Also, do not donate VHS tapes that you used to record Saturday Night Fever off of HBO in the 80s. What do you expect us to do with that?
Ditto what everyone above has said about calling ahead to the library, thrift shop, charity of your choice, or secondhand book store. Every place has its own standards, hours, needs, and capacities.
In my hometown, the public library (I worked there) was set up to take all donations at any time of day or night, put as much as possible in its collection, sell off what it couldn’t use, give away what it couldn’t sell, and landfill what little it couldn’t give away. The library in the last city I lived in didn’t have the staff or storage to handle book donations at all. The Half Price Books (chain secondhand book store in the US) there, though, would take everything you brought them, give you credit for what they thought they could sell, and landfill the rest. The Half Price in my neighborhood in Seattle 15 years ago would donate the rest to the local Goodwill. The indie secondhand place down the street simply wouldn’t take anything it couldn’t sell, and then only on Thursday afternoons.
IMHO there are some books that *should *be taken out of circulation completely, preferably as compost, like out-of-date science texts.
If you go the eBay or Amazon route, as far as I’m concerned, the less packaging the better – I buy a lot of books that way and just hate the overprotected ones. A box is almost never appropriate unless it’s a first edition pop-up made of hand-pressed cellophane, and please, please do not wrap my mass-market paperback in flowered tissue tucked in a Tyvek envelope wrapped in another Tyvek envelope stuffed inside a bubble mailer inside a Priority Mail box you’ve turned inside out to keep the USPS from noticing you’re using it for Media Mail, finished off with six layers of unrippable packing tape.
pant pant
Thank you.
Now if you’re looking for ways to slim down your collection because you can’t seem to part with anything rather than because you don’t know where to part with it, I highly recommend putting books in cardboard boxes in a leaky garage for a few years. Nothing like mildew to break that bond!
So you’re interested in my old beat-up spy paperbacks? The moth-eaten Carl Sandberg Abraham Lincoln The War Years, that my mom bought at her libray sale last year for a dollar and gave to me? The old copies of the 1970’s encyclopedias?
All these I’ve thrown away. Can you honestly say that this should have been saved and taken to my library?
Forgive me if I say, poppycock.
Did you miss the part where I said “properly cared for” (which the OP said his books were)? If you can’t take care of your books and turn them into trash, of course they’ll be thrown into the trash.
And except for the encyclopedias, if those books were in good shape, the library most definitely would have taken them and they would have sold. So you can take your poppeycock and… eh, it’s not worth it.
Send them all to me. (bwah-ha-ha). How many are we talking about here?
I’ve had some success selling duplicates to a used bookstore. You should check to see how much fantasy they carry. You won’t do well if they mostly carry romances or something. However almost every bookstore I’ve visited has a big sf/fantasy section.
I’d think that ebay would be too much trouble, unless you sold a bunch as a set.
The used books sold by my library includes some sf and fantasy, but probably not as much as demand requires.
I’m not sure about charity shops. The ones I go to have a pretty scanty book section, and even the one that carries lots of books don’t have much sf or fantasy. Your average charity shop shopper isn’t really a big fan, from what I can tell. One more place, though. When I was in high school my mother worked in a big hospital in New York, and they had a big library of books for patients, some of which they’d sell to raise money. She got lots of books for me very cheaply that way. You might see if your local hospital would be interested.
As a rule I try not to throw anything in the bin unless it is actual rubbish if there’s a chance an item ahs some utility for someone else, I will try to ghet rid of it that way. Most of the books I will be shifting are in good nick. If I can find absolutely no-one who wants them I suppose I will have to find out if paper banks accept books for recycling. The last thing I want is for them to be buried in a landfill.
I’ve got a simple plan. I’m going to keep collecting books all my life and let someone else figure out how to get rid of them after I’m dead.
Im imagining one of those obituaries where the guy died when one of his book stacks fell on him…
I was trying to sound silly, I did not mean to come off as rude, sorry.
So, if a book is not well-cared for, is it OK to throw it out?
Just a thought, have you checked with your local high school or junior high? I don’t know, but these might be the kind of books that would “catch” some of those kids who don’t read otherwise. Retirement home? Charity resale shop?
Leave them on the bus, one at a time? 
Exactly.
It amazes me that in this day and age, there’s someone who still hasn’t heard of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Throwing away perfectly readable books that don’t happen to be to your taste instead of trying to get them into the hands of someone who might want them is lazy and wasteful.
Some other options:
Freecycle them if freecycle is active in your area. People will take books by lot. I suspect some of those people will then sell them on, but if you’re more worried about getting rid of them than getting money for them, that’s a possibility.
Invite a bunch of friends over with their excess books for a bookswap. Trade books you’ve already read for books you haven’t read yet! I did this recently and it worked charmingly well. Plus, I sent away a lot more books of mine than I selected of my friends, so I reduced my total book count in the process.
As a combination of the above ideas, give them away to your friends. Several of my friends who are downsizing their collections have big boxes of books and when people come to visit them, they direct them to poke through the box and see if there’s anything they’d like to take away.
When I was selling my comic collection via eBay, I was making most of my money off of S&H.
First off, if you’ve got enough books to make it worth while, look into buying in bulk for padded mailing envelopes. I shopped around and found a place that would sell small cases (100 units) of a useful sized envelope for about $0.40. Between that, and using Media Mail rates, I was keeping my S&H under $5.00 for US customers, and still getting about $1.50-2 above my costs for materials and shipping.
I’d also suggest investing in a small digital scale that can be used to weigh things for calculating shipping costs. If you look around you can find kitchen scales for around $10. Which will keep you from quoting S&H that leaves you losing money, because you underestimated the weight of the package.