How do you get rid of books?

[Tybee]

I have a really hard time getting rid of books and always seem to be acquiring new ones.
Those of you who are successful at culling books, how do you do it? I always get interested when I pick it up and want to re-read it or use it more, like cookbooks, dog training books, duck raising books, etc. Books make me feel safe, I think.

But I need more room in my environment and have to move some along. Those of you who can do this, what is your secret?

[catherine]

I thought I'd have a really hard time culling my books during The Purge. I wound up giving about 250 to the library. Surprisingly, with my back against the wall it was pretty easy. I know the books that are lifetime keepers for the most part. I would just ask myself, how badly might I regret getting rid of this book? For those books with information that I can easily get online, I figured I wouldn't regret giving them away. I knew I'd regret the books I'd held onto almost my whole adult life and gone back to from time to time. Books that were part of my identity and core interests I kept. Books with sentimental value I kept. Signed books I kept.

These days, I give away fiction fairly regularly as well as books that I just haven't had any interest in over a two-year period or so.

[early morning]

I'm bad at rehoming books, but I do it from time to time. Those with useful information that I no longer need (I've given up on the idea of living off grid, back-packing across anything larger than our back pasture, eating off the land - including the book with recipes for pond sludge soup!, or moving to France, Italy, Sweden, etc.) or coffee-table bools with lovely pictures go to the library book sale. Those that are aged (pre-1970) are often sold in one of our antique/vintage booths. It's been many years since I've bought a fiction book - that's what libraries are for, lol. So I don't need to worry about those! I still have a lot of books, and still manage to buy one here and there, sorry to say. If I find myself the recipient of an unwanted novel, I give them to my sister to leave at the laundry she frequents, as it has a leave-a-book/take-a-book shelf, which I think is a lovely idea.

[pinkytoe]

If I no longer care to look at or refer to certain books, they get donated to the library bookstore. Recently, I had a box of really old books sitting on top of a closet shelf that I sold on FB Marketplace - all for one price. One could do the same with like genres. I get 98% of my books from the library so don't have many to get rid of anymore. Whenever it seems hard to get rid of anything, I imagine how it might find a more useful life with the next "owner." And let it go...

[Tybee]

I just took ten to the shelf at the grocery where you can buy them but you can also donate them. Took ten and only bought one, and will pass it along to my dil when I am done with it.

I think it's that I don't want to give up on the ideas in some of them. I want to try them out before moving them along. Maybe put a label on them with a date and if I haven't tried it by the date, move it along. Give myself a certain amount of time with each book.

[iris lilies]

Having been in charge of getting rid of literally millions of books, I don’t find it difficult even for my home library once I decided I had to squeeze down to the space I had. I refuse to have books in boxes.

Meanwhile, DH has his college textbooks in boxes that he has not touched for decades. That is ridiculous, but he gets to do him.

I have squeezed and squeezed and squeezed down my collection. I probably have 120 to 150 and I will have to do one more cull, probably 50, if and when we sell our little condo.

[rosarugosa]

I found this to be the one useful idea I got from Marie Kondo, and that was to empty the bookcase, and then decide what would go back into the bookcase, rather than looking at the bookcase to decide what would come out. For some reason, this made a huge difference in my mindset and enabled me to get rid of a lot more books than I would have imagined.

Early: Now I'm disappointed that we will never get to hear your review of Pond Sludge Soup! It sounds so - - interesting - - for you to try, certainly not me!

[happystuff]

I have my "keepers", but others I tend not to have an issues passing on and/or donating. As someone else said, most of my reference-type books went as I know I can find the information online. I also try to keep a list of books I want to read and then highlight them after I have read them. It's nice to have a reference when I forget if I've read something or not. Silly, maybe, but I do tend to forget. LOL.

[iris lilies]

I have a very small collection of fiction volumes, less than one shelf. These are titles I don’t trust a library to have accessible even through interlibrary loan.

I have about 15 nonfiction books, a couple of them not easy to get, but I can’t say I’m in love with any of them really. The novels, though, those are important to me.

But the bulk of my book collection is still children’s illustrated volumes because I collect them as art.

This is not addressing the books on Kindle and that’s where the majority of my reading material comes from these days. There are so many books not available on Kindle, tho. So many!

[catherine]

But the bulk of my book collection is still children’s illustrated volumes because I collect them as art.

That is so cool! Which are your favorites (top 3, or top 5)?