Y'all know you can just drop your books off at Salvation Army or Goodwill or St. Vincent De Paul and make some unemployed slacker on a budget happy, right? You don't have to sign anything, just put 'em in a bag, drop 'em off and somebody else will read them and they won't get wasted.

Plus, also, used bookstores - a good place to recoup your investment.

Also JZ has sold a lot of her books online. Half.com, I think or maybe just eBay.

I like to own books. The size of my apartment and of my paycheck keep me going back to the library. Given unlimited funds and bookcases, I would go to my favorite bookstore and buy about every third book. Then I would take them home. Then I would rub my hands over them and cackle.

What?

Calli! Sister mine!

Dave has threatened to take away my internet access because I Can't Be Trusted at Amazon.com. Half of my garage is empty Amazon boxes. I have great memories of going to the library every week as a kid...and I want to still love the library, but I have this terrible "It's our Precious and we LIKES its!" reaction to my books.

I have a terrible time throwing or giving any of them away. I only just this past week threw out a moldering copy of Anne of Green Gables that I got as a child. And it hurt. I could hear it weeping.

I know!! A library well worth swooning over.

The hang out for all my friends in high school was the library. It's where we met, every day. We weren't goody-two shoes either; we'd meet there and go drive around and get stoned then come back and hang out some more. We were mostly in the same classes.

Re: the rolling ladder on tracks--

Forgive me if you've heard this one. I was working at B&N when word came down from District that we had to do away with our overstock shelves, which were high on the walls above the regular stock shelves. There were rails around three walls of the store, with rolling ladders every 20-30 feet. They hired a crew to come in and rip out solid hardwood facing mouldings, metal bracket strips and brackets, metal shelving, linear feet of metal railing, and probably 2 dozen hardwood rolling ladders. Everything went into the dumpster. We got special lisence for the employees to dumpster dive, and I claimed three of the ladders, plus a 10-foot section of 1" x 8" walnut board routed on one edge and used as facing. We kept the ladders in our storage locker for a couple of years before dealing with the reality that we have 7ft. ceilings and no available walls for floor to ceiling bookshelves.

We wound up donating the ladders to the set department of NCSA. Maybe they'll use them in a production of Beauty and the Beast or My Fair Lady someday.

Plus, also, used bookstores - a good place to recoup your investment.

Unless you're in the Bay Area. I've made about $250 selling books through half.com -- all books that I tried to sell at every single local used bookstore I could find. Local friends who've tried to sell report the same thing. My mom, who manages a used bookstore out in Concord, just sighed when I asked her about it and said yup, local economy still the shits, independent booksellers particularly hard hit, nobody's buying anything unless it's truly rare and collectible (if you have a complete run of McSweeney's you're willing to part with, or a signed first of a tiny handful of writers who are both local and big-name, those you can sell for money--everything else, NSM). They won't even take the books for free, because they need the space on their shelves.

If you just want to reclaim space: Goodwill, Salvation Army, hospitals, rest homes, homeless shelters. If you want a tiny crumb in cash or trade: Half Price Books. If you want an actual return on your investment: half.com, but be prepared to box up the books and wait weeks or even months for them all to sell.

YUsedBookMarketMV, of course. It's just the utter shits in Northern California.

The Used Book market around here revolves around the local university schedules. A month after the students have moved out? Don't bother -- they sold all their books for beer money as soon as finals were over and the market's glutted. Halfway through a given semester? You might make a few bucks. I think the most I ever got locally was $50, though, because I tend to love my books hard.

I've had much better luck selling through half.com than trying to sell directly to used bookstores. If a book doesn't sell after a few months, I usually leave it at my laundromat and put a note on Bookcrossing.

Heretically for a buffista, I almost never buy books I haven't read already. I don't need to own books unless I plan to reread them.

Flea is me. I pretty much re-read damn near everything I own at some point or another.

I know I *should* go to the library (because I'm almost out of space to keep books), but being able to go to a used book store and buy whatever books I wanted was a dream of mine when I was a starving college student/retail worker; now that I have a kinda/sorta steady job, I'm going to buy books, darn it!

JZ's analysis pretty much applies to New York as well. I've done much better selling on Half.com than I have in physical bookstores.

I'm trying out Ebay; the whole auctioning thing scares me, but there's one book without an ISBN that I can't sell at Half.com but should be able to auction off for at least a few hundred dollars. But I'm assuming I'll need an ebay history before anyone's willing to bid high.