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Hi, after a recent flat clearance I have a lot of books to get rid of. Most are reference books used by an artist all in good condition.
I'm looking for ideas in possible ways to get rid of them. Ideally I would like to donate to charity or good cause, but my local charity shops are not taking any more books at the moment. I'm not looking to sell them.
Any thoughts from stw? (Expecting at least one post about freezing and burying in neighbour's garden)
Thanks
Ebay or similar? Either as individual lots or job lot? I accept that postage can be a PITA.
If they are text books, what about a school or college?
Use them as a background for Zoom calls.
See if there is a charity book bank locally. British heart foundation have them.
Would a college or library take them? not much use in lockdown, but for when things improve?
Find a forum or Facebook group related to the subject of the books and offer them there as free to whoever will collect them.
Something like this:
https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/find-bhf-near-you/book-bank-selkirk-community-recycling-site
Coming soon to a living room near you:
when I was leaving the UK, I sold all my books to these guys:
Was a few years ago, but was pretty good at the time - might have changed since then. You just scan the barcode and it tells you how much they'll give you for it. From memory, most paperback fiction was between 30p and a pound, but its the non-fiction reference type books that they seemed to offer the most for.
It was clear that you can get more selling amazon/ebay whatever, but I was willing to trade that for convenience - couldn't have been easier.
Sorry to say this but when we cleared out our house three months we threw about half our books, mostly paperbacks, in the skip. It's too much hassle getting rid of them.
Local auction will tell you if they are worth anything.
Oxfam bookshop will prob be interested, they may ebay anything of value and will sell large volumes for pulp.
Edit-after lockdown obviously
music magpie and world of books both buy books and will send a courier to pick them up,
Thanks for all the ideas
What about a book sharing app? There must be a few but I remembered hearing of this one https://www.bookcrossing.com/
We were having a clear out and had a LOAD of (and I'm not making this up...) 1950s and '60s 'specialist poultry-keeping books' that were taking up loads of room. A bit of a search and it turns out there's a whole world of enthusiasts interested in that sort of thing. A chat with a dealer and it turned out we had a few of interest to him that he was interested to buy. We told him that he had to take the lot or no deal - cue a very dodgy looking meetup in a car park in Milton Keynes, a hundred quid for my troubles and a very happy antiquarian poultry book dealer...
Which is a roundabout way of saying 'There'll be someone out there who's really interested' - and even if you're looking to give them away, if you find the right person, they'll make it easy for you.