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The Case for Giving Away Your Books

MULTIZ321

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The Case for Giving Away Your Books
By Ephrat Livni/ Quartzy/ qz.com

"No topic inflames the passions of literary types more than the question of getting rid of books.

Even the hippest minimalists make exceptions for literature, arguing that they will return to the best texts and have been filled with regret when they gave favorite tomes away. And though many have signed on for the life-changing magic of tidying up—the famous Marie Kondo book and decluttering method, now a Netflix series—some steadfastly refuse to include books in the category of stuff that burdens us.

Books are objects. Yet they are special. Unlike other things that take up space, they have a certain cachet. An excess of texts doesn’t seem wasteful or materialistic to many, even in these times of decluttering frenzy. Instead, it’s considered impressive....."

bookish.jpg

Who can’t spot a bookish type?


Richard
 

DrQ

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I gave up keeping technical books years ago and subscribe to Safari Online (O'Reilly).
 

jeffwill

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This is RIGHT ON for me. I don't have a TV aboard Solitude--- I read. The few downsides of living on a boat is space. You need a mini warehouse for family stuff and a clean laundromat. Half my Mini was filled with boxes of books. I started donating them to our library book store and buying new ones at the same time. I tend to find a new author and then read everything he has written. It is HARD giving back a GOOD hardback. I'm to old fashion to buy a Kindle. When your in your 70's, you KNOW that you'll forget the story and get to enjoy it again in a few years.
 

WinniWoman

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IMG_1346.JPG
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I love books and I have a hard time getting rid of them- but a few years ago I did get rid of a lot of them- I brought them all to Goodwill. My shelves were overflowing. I did a great job cleaning them out. I was surprised I was able to do it.

I kept the ones most special to me- I have bookshelves in my study. Each shelf has certain topics. Ex: Astrology, Dogs and Animals, Finance, Health and Wellness, Alaska and Hawaii, Travel, some Fiction (but little) and Reference , etc.

I always tell people you can tell everything about me by looking at the books on the shelves. Yes- I do refer to them and re-read them occasionally. And- I also have a Kindle. LOL!

Then there is my fairly new GINORMOUS coffee table in our living room- loaded with- you guessed it- coffee table books. Topics? Vermont, New Hampshire, National Parks....Essentially the books I like to look at and dream about my favorite places and plan vacations.

Upstairs on my bedroom nightstand are poetry books from my favorites- Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Edna St. Vincent Milay, Emily Dickinson, etc.
 
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Jan M.

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This is RIGHT ON for me. I don't have a TV aboard Solitude--- I read. The few downsides of living on a boat is space. You need a mini warehouse for family stuff and a clean laundromat. Half my Mini was filled with boxes of books. I started donating them to our library book store and buying new ones at the same time. I tend to find a new author and then read everything he has written. It is HARD giving back a GOOD hardback. I'm to old fashion to buy a Kindle. When your in your 70's, you KNOW that you'll forget the story and get to enjoy it again in a few years.

After years of resisting I finally bought myself a Kindle last year. I was 67 and never thought I would be willing to give up holding an actual book in my hands. My husband is on his second e-reader and had to keep after me to start using the Kindle for the first couple of months I had it. I'm glad he did. However his reason for nagging me to finally get one and learn to use it was self serving. He was tired of lugging my heavy bag of books I always took with me up several flights of stairs when we stay at the timeshares that don't have elevators.
 

WinniWoman

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After years of resisting I finally bought myself a Kindle last year. I was 67 and never thought I would be willing to give up holding an actual book in my hands. My husband is on his second e-reader and had to keep after me to start using the Kindle for the first couple of months I had it. I'm glad he did. However his reason for nagging me to finally get one and learn to use it was self serving. He was tired of lugging my heavy bag of books I always took with me up several flights of stairs when we stay at the timeshares that don't have elevators.


I am so funny. I do not like reading books on vacation. The only thing I like reading are magazines, brochures and other types of info related to the area we are staying at. I feel like if I read something else I would be escaping from the place I just escaped to. I don't want to take my mind off the place I am at on vacation.

Sooo- we have to lug up a soft briefcase I have with all kinds of info. related to where we are - usually Vermont or New Hampshire- as well as a couple of my travel books on those states for ideas so we can explore more. Both our timeshares do not have elevators and both are on the top floor.

When we fly- which we rarely do- I only bring a related travel book for where we are going. When I get to where we are going- I load up on all kinds of free literature from visitors centers etc. and soak up everything I can learn.

I do not like the kindle for reference type books. I just don't find it easy to go back and forth between pages and so on. Kind of why I like paper maps also- which I also have a HUGE road atlas in the car I like to refer to. I LOVE maps- and globes! (I have a globe on my desk that lights up.)

Between the internet and my physical books, I honestly rarely use my kindle to read anything anymore. I used to use it a lot, but I got out of it over time for some reason. Maybe because I am more of a non fiction reader than a fiction reader and I do like to refer back within the books.
 

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I'm slowly getting rid of my books. Been reading on an e-reader for at least five years.
 

Ralph Sir Edward

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I love to read. I first got into e-books in 2007. I now have a library on a chip of 2,000+ books. It goes with me on every trip. I may not read on the trip, but if I do, I have 90% of all my books with me. (I also have a nice music player. It's chip has my entire music library on it. I can listen to anything I want to in my timeshare.) Total combined weight - less than a pound (1/2 kilo). No cachet of books to look at, but very functional.

On my first big trip to Hawaii (1999-2000) I hand carried 30+ pound of books. Now I carry a few ounces. . .
 

bnoble

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I had to give up my faculty office, because we are out of space and I can use the Chair office for now. When I moved out, I kept one box. Everything else---shelves and shelves of books, papers, conference proceedings, etc.---got tossed.

I kept the signed dissertations of former students, and a few books with strong sentimental value. Not much else.
 

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We love books, and have shelves of them in both our main floor and upstairs offices and in our main guest bedroom. We are looking to downsize our home in the next 2 or 3 years, so have started the "decluttering" process big time. Many of the books are old professional texts or manuals, or 50-year-old university texts; long out-of-date and many of them available on line for years...so really just dust collectors. Those are the easy ones to throw out; most so old, even the library or Goodwill are not interested! :p

We were motivated to start this de-cluttering in 2017 when we had to move my then 97-year-old father-in-law into a retirement home in 2017 (and he's still going strong at 99 :cool:). His home was much smaller than ours and even with multiple siblings and spouses it was a huge job to clear out 40 years of accumulated "stuff". We vowed not to make someone else have to do that with our "stuff". You can now actually see parts of our basement floor!!:whooopie::whooopie:

You do get attached to many books, but both DW and I have had Kindles for several years. They are great for reading in a darkened room when the other party is trying to sleep. And as others have pointed out we save the weight and space needed to cart around real books when travelling. How freeing that is!! :thumbup:
 

Panina

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Whereas I use a tablet for reading, I still purchase books and keep my favorites. There is nothing like flipping thru a book especially ones with recipes or pictures.

When cds became the thing I gave away my extensive record collection and now I wish I didn’t. Seems the are popular again.

I am keeping my books, even if they disappear and stay unpopular.
 

clifffaith

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It chaps my behind to pay almost equal to the price of a book for a Kindle book. A real book I can maybe resell on eBay (especially if I can sell several by the same author in one bundle). So my Kindle has books that were on special, mostly. I loaded the Anne of Green Gables series a couple years ago and I'm still reading a few pages every time I have a doctor's appointment. Someone on TUG last year pointed out that the first novel (spy, I think) of an author who has several dozen with the same character, was available for 99cents one day, so I loaded that with the idea that if I liked the book I'd go on eBay for the full series, read it, then resell it. The most recent book I paid full kindle price for was last year when they caught the Golden State Killer. I liked instantly being able to read the author's research on the killings (sadly she died before they caught him using familial DNA).

When we lived in a Victorian home for eight years I bought a dozen or so Easton Press "classics" on eBay when I could buy them for about $25. But let me tell you that life is too short and there are too many books to read to slog through Lord Jim or The Mill on the Floss. I would have thrown the Floss book across the room for the stupid ending if I didn't need it in good condition to list on eBay. Unfortunately the market price is maybe $17 or $18 now, and there is lots of competition. I'm forcing myself to read each one, then slipping it downstairs to the eBay book shelf because Cliff finds it impossible to give up any books.

This week, once again he carried Hume Selections to a doctor's appt for the umpteenth time. This is a used paper back philosophy book he picked up somewhere, and has an inscription from Rutgers U, 1962 in the front. He seemed to be only about 50 pages in after all this time, and so I called him on it. "You've been reading that book for a year". "Well, it's written in the original words from 1750 (or whenever), so it's slow going and I ponder it". "Ponder schmonder, you have stacks of new books you haven't read, for God's sake let it go, there's no prize for suffering through to the end!" I got him to at least put it back on the bookshelf and stop carrying it. But I'm sneaky and I'll move it several times, then whoops, it will fall in the trash can before we move.
 

Luanne

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I used to have boxes of books that I kept and would re-read. I got rid of most of them quite a few years ago. I still have a few, and I do continue to re-read them. Now I buy most of the books from the used supply at the library, and that is where I donate books when I'm done.
 

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I love to read and usually enjoy more than a book a week....so I’m a dedicated library user. I don't feel any need to own or ever re-read most of the stuff I read for pleasure. But I do have one book shelf filled with cookbooks, because I worked in the food industry and have a sentimental attachment to some of them. I do pull them out to research new recipes or to return to some favorites, but I find I'm using internet searches of a couple favorite food sites more often for that, too, so I'll probably start to clean out more of the cookbooks also.
 

T_R_Oglodyte

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When cds became the thing I gave away my extensive record collection and now I wish I didn’t. Seems the are popular again.
Funny. I just noticed my CD towers on some shelves in our spare room. I long ago burned all of them to the computer. So much easier to manage and store. Then I have all of my absolute favorites downloaded to my phone, so I have that with me all of the time. I can listen on a plane, listen while I'm driving, wherever. I can also send it through our house wi-fi.

I"m about 2/3 of way finished uploading it all to eMusic on the cloud (I've got about 12,500 tracks in my library, so it takes sometime, and sometimes I have to convert formats since eMusic only loads MP3 format). So then I will be able to access the entire library whenever I have internet access, plus it will all be backed up so if my drive crashes I can easily restore my library.
 

Panina

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Funny. I just noticed my CD towers on some shelves in our spare room. I long ago burned all of them to the computer. So much easier to manage and store. Then I have all of my absolute favorites downloaded to my phone, so I have that with me all of the time. I can listen on a plane, listen while I'm driving, wherever. I can also send it through our house wi-fi.

I"m about 2/3 of way finished uploading it all to eMusic on the cloud (I've got about 12,500 tracks in my library, so it takes sometime, and sometimes I have to convert formats since eMusic only loads MP3 format). So then I will be able to access the entire library whenever I have internet access, plus it will all be backed up so if my drive crashes I can easily restore my library.
My other half does the same as you. I have a bunch that I can read on my ipad or listen to on my tiny pods but still love flipping a book.
 
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WinniWoman

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Whereas I use a tablet for reading, I still purchase books and keep my favorites. There is nothing like flipping thru a book especially ones with recipes or pictures.

When cds became the thing I gave away my extensive record collection and now I wish I didn’t. Seems the are popular again.

I am keeping my books, even if they disappear and stay unpopular.

I still have CD's and I have also burned some of my music onto CD's from the computer. I still like popping them into the CD player in my car.
 

WinniWoman

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It chaps my behind to pay almost equal to the price of a book for a Kindle book. A real book I can maybe resell on eBay (especially if I can sell several by the same author in one bundle). So my Kindle has books that were on special, mostly. I loaded the Anne of Green Gables series a couple years ago and I'm still reading a few pages every time I have a doctor's appointment. Someone on TUG last year pointed out that the first novel (spy, I think) of an author who has several dozen with the same character, was available for 99cents one day, so I loaded that with the idea that if I liked the book I'd go on eBay for the full series, read it, then resell it. The most recent book I paid full kindle price for was last year when they caught the Golden State Killer. I liked instantly being able to read the author's research on the killings (sadly she died before they caught him using familial DNA).

When we lived in a Victorian home for eight years I bought a dozen or so Easton Press "classics" on eBay when I could buy them for about $25. But let me tell you that life is too short and there are too many books to read to slog through Lord Jim or The Mill on the Floss. I would have thrown the Floss book across the room for the stupid ending if I didn't need it in good condition to list on eBay. Unfortunately the market price is maybe $17 or $18 now, and there is lots of competition. I'm forcing myself to read each one, then slipping it downstairs to the eBay book shelf because Cliff finds it impossible to give up any books.

This week, once again he carried Hume Selections to a doctor's appt for the umpteenth time. This is a used paper back philosophy book he picked up somewhere, and has an inscription from Rutgers U, 1962 in the front. He seemed to be only about 50 pages in after all this time, and so I called him on it. "You've been reading that book for a year". "Well, it's written in the original words from 1750 (or whenever), so it's slow going and I ponder it". "Ponder schmonder, you have stacks of new books you haven't read, for God's sake let it go, there's no prize for suffering through to the end!" I got him to at least put it back on the bookshelf and stop carrying it. But I'm sneaky and I'll move it several times, then whoops, it will fall in the trash can before we move.


Yes. Kindle books used to be so much less expensive then even paperbacks and now the price has gone up and that makes it less attractive to me. I still haven;t joined a library- that would be best so can get the books for free.

I don't like the books Amazon has on the free users library and it is sooooo difficult to search those on kindle anyway. I wish they could easily be searched on my laptop and then added to kindle, but Amazon keeps them "hidden" on the website. I guess they really don't want customers using the free library instead of purchasing books. I even wrote to Amazon about it and did not get a satisfactory reply. So much for that Prime benefit.
 

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Yes. Kindle books used to be so much less expensive then even paperbacks and now the price has gone up and that makes it less attractive to me. I still haven;t joined a library- that would be best so can get the books for free.

I don't like the books Amazon has on the free users library and it is sooooo difficult to search those on kindle anyway. I wish they could easily be searched on my laptop and then added to kindle, but Amazon keeps them "hidden" on the website. I guess they really don't want customers using the free library instead of purchasing books. I even wrote to Amazon about it and did not get a satisfactory reply. So much for that Prime benefit.

not only the higher prices but also the different ebook formats (mobi). Of course you can get all the ebooks downloaded for free unrestricted on certain internet websites but authors and publishers absolutely hate that !
 

klpca

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I used to love to read but my eyesight is awful and most books have fonts that are too small for me to comfortably read, even with my prescription reading glasses. I am 57 and more than a bit peeved about that. I just got a kindle for Christmas and am in the adjustment period. It is much easier to read, but miss the feel of the actual book. For the past 5 years or so, most of my content has been via audio books which I love to listen to while driving to work. My favorite was the Harry Potter series because the reader did a phenomenal job.

As far as cost goes, the public library offers a lot for free including ebooks and audio books. There are ways to stretch your dollars - with Audible I pay for the whole year at once so the cost is ~$150 for 12 books vs $15/month. Audible also has sales (buy 2 get one free), daily deals, plus free content monthly. I am not sure if Amazon offers something similar for Kindle, but there is Kindle unlimited which may be a good deal if you are a prolific reader.
 

bbodb1

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Since the subject of this thread is books, and I need to go on a purge myself - let me ask this question. If one has some old books that might have some value, is there a reputable resource to turn to in order to see if the book might have some value?

I know it is beyond a long shot, but if I did not check this out I'd feel like I left a stone unturned.
 

clifffaith

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Since the subject of this thread is books, and I need to go on a purge myself - let me ask this question. If one has some old books that might have some value, is there a reputable resource to turn to in order to see if the book might have some value?

I know it is beyond a long shot, but if I did not check this out I'd feel like I left a stone unturned.

An easy way to check is on the Solds on eBay. Then list as an auction, rather than Fixed Price, if it looks like it could be worth something (and just in case you missed the fact that it was a first edition or something special). And NEVER stop an auction because someone contacts you with an offer, you can be sure you have something special if they contact you. And the book doesn't necessarily need to be old, just in short supply. I went on a binge of buying pop-up children's books about 30 years ago. When I decided I was done, I found that several had either low printings, or most books had been mangled by kids, and since we are a child free, smoke free, but not cat free household, I was able to find buyers and at least get my investment back, if not a little more.
 

T_R_Oglodyte

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I still have CD's and I have also burned some of my music onto CD's from the computer. I still like popping them into the CD player in my car.
I used to use the car CD player. But now with Bluetooth connection, I just use the music files in my phone. If I'm in a car that doesn't have Bluetooth, I plug my phone into the auxiliary jack.

Things that I used to burn as a custom CD, I just do as a playlist.

Much less clunky than fumbling around with CDs, and I have many more music choices available.
 

WinniWoman

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Since the subject of this thread is books, and I need to go on a purge myself - let me ask this question. If one has some old books that might have some value, is there a reputable resource to turn to in order to see if the book might have some value?

I know it is beyond a long shot, but if I did not check this out I'd feel like I left a stone unturned.

You could sell them on Amazon.
 
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