What to do with old books

[Hastoomuchstuff]

Posting here as it seems to be the busiest page. Do people actually buy books anymore? We have some beautiful hard backed books on all sorts of subjects left from my deceased pil. What do people do with them? The market is flooded with used books at very low prices. It grieves me to even give them to charity shops as they'll probably just gather dust & eventually be disposed of. Has anyone found a place to successfully sell them?

It’s worth downloading both Music Magpie and Ziffit, and seeing how much they’ll take them for by scanning the barcodes. Most fiction book sell for peanuts (50p), but some they’ll take for £5 or more. They also pay for your postage.

Sorry, ISBN code!

Thank you, I forgot to mention that these are old & don't have bar codes to scan

Yes I was in my local charity shop at the weekend she bought 3 books, give them to charity!

I absolutely adore old books and get all of mine from the charity shops have picked up lots of pre 1930s books that I can pay anything from £5-10 from charity shops rather than the usual 50p and I store them in a special bookcase. Whilst I may be unusual in this I'm sure I'm not unique

Give to a local Global Education Trust bookshop. Phenomenal charity, they never turn books away and they give away over a million books a year. More focussed than a general charity shop.

We have a few local book shop in towns near by that sell old hardbacks or just generally interesting books. It might be worth sourcing out shops like that and asking advice. Good luck

Webuybooks.co.uk does take some pre-ISBN books. It’s worth trying- reference hardbacks seem to be what they like best

Am

Definitely give them to charity, or to an old peoples home if they're taking books atm and they're for that audience.

Do you have any second hand bookshops locally? You can run them past them and they will take anything they know will sell. Alternatively, do you have any local auctions? You may only get a few pounds for a large box but again they will have gone to someone who can use them.

Contact local second hand booksellers.

Shaun bythell in Wigtown regularly writes in his own books about going and valuing/buying 'house clearances' (he rubs a second hand bookshop) so I assume it's routine in the trade. You have to be realistic about value though

Or you can sell yourself via eBay or Abe

I buy old books! (Sorry, that doesn't really help you.) If they've got value, or you think they might have, you could give them to Oxfam who I think take the valuable books they're donated and sell them online. Which means they'll get the true value, and someone who wants them will have bought them.

do you have any antique shops nearby, or specialist book sellers

Yes, give them to charity. Some of them might be 'worth something' but it's difficult to tell if you're not experienced in selling books and haven't the time to look them all up online and see what they are selling for.

I was passed down an old book after my grandfather died. I loved it and wanted to see if I could buy another copy as a present for someone. When I looked online, I found copies were selling for £150!

i guess you could look into ebay?

I'd use Ziffit and donate the money to my local foodbank right now.

Sorry, didn't read you update. Check on ebay for similar to see if they are worth selling?

Chat gets just as much traffic as AIBU and would be more appropriate for your post.

most touristy towns have second hand book shops ime

Yep, contact a second-hand bookdealer - my dad is one and often gets called to do house clearances or when someone has died. They'll buy anything that's worth selling and the rest you can put on freecycle or give to a charity shop (although bear in mind that a lot of charity shops like Oxfam will send most books to pulp unless they're quite recent)

We give them to our local Oxfam bookstore.

Also it depends on the subject.
Certain books on eg, aviation, art, magic and so on can be very valuable. What subject op?

I’ve had the same dilemma for the same reason and I’m sorry for your loss. We have an Oxfam book shop and they got most of the books. They look to see if anything is valuable. We had piles and piles of books, and some collections relating to particular times. We wanted all the books to have good homes where they’d be as loved and read as possible but we had to just give them away as specialist shops didn’t want them. It wasn’t about the money just they were loved books and we wanted them to be loved again!

Don’t necessarily trust online prices. Many amazon/eBay sellers use automated price setting software which can throw up anomalies, if one seller hasn’t got their settings configured correctly and price a book wrong, others usually follow as the software is configured to track market value and price accordingly.

Charity shops pick out what they want then sell the rest by weight to the book/rag man. They then either sell to an Amazon/eBay dealer, again by weight, or some of them are actually online booksellers themselves. At this point the software is used to decide which to list for sale and at what price. Rejects get recycled (mulched) by the lorry load.

Slightly OT but interesting