Sunday, July 8, 2012

What do you do with your books?


by: Joelle Charbonneau

No.  This isn’t a trick question.  Yes.  When you buy a book, you read it.  (Although if you are fighting schedule crunches like me, you buy a book and it sits on the nightstand for quite a while before I finally eek out the time to read it.)  Sometimes you’ll love the book.  Other times you’ll wonder what the heck all the hype was about.  Then you sit the book to the side and…

What?

What do you do with your books that you have read?

For me, I admit I keep LOTS and LOTS of books in my house.  My shelves and drawers are a testament to the number of books that I purchase.  And as many of you know, I am a fan of printed books.  We own an e-reader, but I seem to be a traitor to my generation and can’t seem to relax when I read off a screen.  I’m odd that way.

While my dream is to have a house big enough to convert a room into my own personal library with one of those ladders you push around the walls….the house I live in now can’t hold all the books that I buy.  Which means if I don’t plan on rereading a book, I have to find it a new home.

So, what do I do with my books?  A few I give to friends who I think will enjoy the.  The rest I box up and take to my local library.

Ok, to some of you that might sound funny.  I mean, the library is already full of books.  They probably don’t need mine to keep the shelves full.  And while that is often true, they do need my books.  And they need yours.  Most library districts are fighting huge budget crunches.  Not a surprise, right?  Which means they need funds from other sources.  One of the biggest sources of extra income is book sales.  My local library has a great room where all paperbacks are $.50 and hardcovers are $1.00.  (Except for some of the newer hardcovers that they charge a bit more for.)  While those prices don’t seem like a lot, the money adds up.  In fact, some libraries earn over $50,000 a year in book sales.  Which means more story times for our kids, more books and DVDs for us to check out and more services for the community.

A win-win.

So, if you have books sitting around the house that you never plan on reading again…please consider supporting your local library and making a donation.  They’ll even give you a great form that allows you to write the donation off you’re your taxes next year.  You’ll get the deduction and the benefit of thriving libraries which are so very necessary to us all.

6 comments:

Steve Weddle said...

I like to have many, many books around the house -- on shelves and tables -- so that people think I am smart.

Scott D. Parker said...

This very fact is one of the reasons I am growing to appreciate ebooks: no visible storage necessary. For better or worse, I tend to have emotional attachments to my books, so they remain with me, boxed or bagged, for me to "discover" in the future.

IandSsmom said...

I give mine to the library too! I love my library so it is my tiny way of helping out! oh and de-cluttering! Now if only I could read faster to give them more of these books!! :)
Shannon

Erica said...

I give quite a few of mine to the library as well! :) The librarian has started to shelve all the more recent titles, which I think is so nice.

Dru said...

I give my books to friends. I use to donate to the library, but they no longer accept donations at my local branch.

Em said...

I work at a library, so most of my good-condition books go to them if I just don't have the room. I have a cookbook I was given and never used, some children's books I have duplicates of, and a fairly new textbook that didn't cost enough to bother sending back.

Year-round there's a used-book store area and a fifty-cent paperbacks table, which draw in a fair amount. We're setting aside nicer paperbacks right now for a special booksale in a couple weeks, so I'm keeping an eye out for those as well. I know at least two donations have recently gone into the collections (the Fright Night remake and a Star Trek guide) because I saw them come in and asked to be first on the request list if they were added!

Something to add here that I can't stress enough, though, is if you're pulling old books out of your garage or attic, please at least have the courtesy to first dust off the cobwebs, remove any moldy books, and dump the dead bugs and old tissues out of the milk crates.

Whether they get sold or not, people have to touch these things at some point!