Books galore!
Do you have too many books at home, and you just don’t know what to do with them? Before I started working in libraries, I used to buy a lot of books. I also moved eight times in ten years. Each move necessitated a major book purge. I never knew what to do with my cast-offs. I gave them away to friends and relatives. I threw a lot of them away. Then I became a little cleverer. I shall now pass my great ideas on to you, in case you are looking at giant piles of books with no idea what to do with them.
First and foremost, you can donate your books to the library. At the Fairborn Community Library, we accept all current, popular fiction and nonfiction paperback and hardcover books. We’ll look through any donations and decide if the library needs the book to fill a spot on the shelf. If we already own a copy, we’ll check to see if the library copy is still in good condition or if the donated one is better, in which case we’ll swap it. If we don’t need to add the donations to our collection, we’ll put the donated books on the perpetual book sale. These books are available for the public to purchase for 50 cents or a dollar. The funds are used by the Friends of the Library for library programs, new books, furniture and other improvements to the library. So even if your donation is not put on the shelf, the book still goes to helping the library, and someone else will appreciate it! Just a caution, however, the library cannot accept any books that are moldy, wet or otherwise in poor condition. We also cannot use things which are out of date, such as encyclopedia sets, textbooks and magazines. Save your back and don’t haul this kind of book to the library.
There are a couple of other places you can donate. Sometimes shelters and churches collect books to give to people in need. The jail will take paperbacks, but they have specific guidelines for content. Sometimes Goodwill will take some. You can usually give most books away to someone (except those pesky National Geographics! Those beautiful magazines are so hard to get rid of!)
If you’ve got some items that you think might be valuable, you can try to sell them on eBay. We have a staff member here who sells some of the books that the library no longer needs (the money goes to the Friends group). You’d be surprised at the prices people will pay for some books.
One other idea for used books: if you’d like a new book, you can swap your old book on one of several book swapping websites. Book Mooch, PaperbackSwap, Bookins, and WhatsOnMyBookShelf are just a few. If you do an Internet search for “book swap” you should find any number of them. Basically these are websites where you can offer your books for swapping and find other books to receive. They all set up the swap slightly differently, but the idea is the same. Send someone your unneeded book, get another in exchange. You could get new books forever for just the price of shipping. Great idea.
If you don’t want to get rid of your books, my next post will have some ideas for organizing them at home.