Community Book Solutions is a company which takes book donations and gets them to libraries. They also seem to have a book sales arm, which they don’t talk about much on their web site. That’s a little skeevy, if they’re selling the books people donate to them. On the other hand, I’ve found a few recommendations from librarians. And when you get right down to it, the fact that they’ll come to your house and box and pick up your books? That’s a total win for me. They take just about everything, too.
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I’ve been reading about libraries and book selection lately. It seems that it’s not uncommon for a library to have to get rid of around 2% of their selection every time they “weed” their books. A good sized metro library system can have over 2 million books, so – well, do the arithmetic. That’s a lot of books they have to get rid of on an annual basis.
Interestingly, libraries have a heckuva time getting rid of their old copies of Quark 1.0 for Dummies, so they find themselves in an interesting position; they can either trash the book or… something. If they trash the book, inevitably someone happens to be strolling by the dumpster that day, and next thing you know there’s a blog with much hand-wringing and o-the-humanity someone is getting rid of perfectly good books, and how this is just awful in the midst of library funding shortage, and how the library should have found a deserving charity.
With all of this being the case, and with librarians trying to rid their shelves of rarely-used books, I’d be kind of surprised if more than half of your no-longer-wanted books wind up on library shelves. Prisons and homeless shelters, maybe. I would bet a lot of libraries use Community Book Solutions to get rid of their own stock, rather than the other way around.