I reread almost all my books, and if I buy a book, it's with the intention of doing so. The 20 or so that I haven't reread at least once are textbooks which I keep for reference (and even those I've at least paged through).

I have some books that I revisit at least once a year.

I did send about 15 books to Goodwill last year, but those were mainly fluffy chick lit pieces that I'd received as gifts and didn't merit another re-read. And a lot of books that I've checked out from the library are on my future "to buy" list.

I need more shelves.

I'm an avid reader and I've lived my life under the mantra "You can never own too many books." Now I"m out of space and I need more shelves - which means spending money on a "nonessential" item. I'm very conflicted about this, some of my books I could justify selling - fluffy chick lit pieces or things I don't want to read again, but many of my books I read over and over and over. It's not unusual for me to read a book several times in a year. I go through 4 or 5 books a week and my library can't keep up with my voracious reading.

I've slashed my book budget for the year and so far I've been doing okay with that but I just can't see getting rid of about 90% of my books. I'd be intereseted in reading more about the Amazon process though, and if I got started maybe it'd compell me to sell more books - I can hope anyway.

Does anyone know if Half Price Books gives a decent return on books? I've been thinking of bringing all my unwanted books there.

There's a relatively new book networking site called GoodReads.com. You can load your books into the system and get a better idea of all the ones you have that you still need to read. For me it's very easy to buy more books than I have the time to read.

I am continually selective about which books I keep. When I research acquiring a book, I first check www.fetchbook.info, which is a great comparison shopping portal.
Once I want to pass a book on, I post it on amazon. The quickest way to move a book is to check the lowest price on the site, and undercut it a bit!
If that doesn't work, I offer it on www.freecycle.org in my local group.
If that doesn't work, I know the book is really a dog and shake hands with putting it outdoors on the curb, or leaving it at the public library for resale. I am all in favor of leaving books for libraries to sell to generate funds, it's just that I know such a book is unlikely to sell there, either.

If you:

* have a collection to keep track
* use a mac
* enjoy obsessing over your collection

You might want to check out Delicious Library ( http://www.delicious-monster.com/ ). It's a reall fun app for tracking your personal library. The best thing about it is that to add a book you just hold the bar code up to a camera (liek the iSight built into MacBooks) and it scans the bar code and downloads all of the info about that book and a cover shot for you. So there's no boring data entry involved.

I stopped using it because it was getting int he way of my decision to off load 90% of my library, but it's very fun.

Thanks for the info here. I've come across this program a year or so ago but didn't have a mac at the time. Now we've purchased an iMac and a Macbook and our family is always asking to borrow from our 150+ DVD collection. I'll have to go through and drop in all our movies to keep track of them.

Decent is, I'm afraid, all relative. In order to sell your book to someone else at half-price, they'd have to buy it from you for less than that to stay in business. Assuming you paid less than half of the list price and your books are both well cared-for and reasonably desirable to others, you might just break even. I'm in the book collector crowd, so I shop at HPB intending to keep them.

If you want more for your books, selling them through Amazon is probably the best alternative. Unfortunately, you're not guaranteed to sell them, as compared to HPB.

As owner of a sizable book collection myself, this is a fascinating thread. I've always had the 'just buy more shelves' philosophy, and it's interesting to see so many people selling books.

Looks like I've got a lot of serious thinking to do.

We're currently trying to reduce clutter. We just went through all of our books and decided which ones we want to keep and which ones to get rid of. We cleared so much space on our shelves and it felt great!

We're going to try a yard sale sometime soon and if have no luck selling the books, there are few used book stores around. We can donate them, I suppose.

I used to have this same philosophy!

I knew I had a problem, though, when I realized there wasn't anywhere to put any more bookshelves. Our house was full of them. Plus I had books stacked in the garage and the workshop. Most of these were books I had never read, and never would have the time to read. I had four or five copies of some favorites. ("Another copy of Cold Mountain for only four bucks? How can I pass that up?") It never occurred to me that it didn't matter how much I liked it -- I was never going to be able to read more than one copy at once, so the extra copies were a foolish waste.

One day about eighteen months ago, right as I was beginning my financial rennaisance, I went through the house like a whirlwind, collecting stacks and stacks of books, gathering them in the living room, and then purging them from my life.



It was awesome! I still love books, and always will, but I've begun to focus more all on quality than quantity. I still lapse and buy a half dozen at a time at a used book store, but mostly I only bring in books that I know I want...

One of the used bookstores in my hometown had a really great offer: fill a produce box with as many books as you could for only $24.95. I would go and clear whole sections of that bookstore. And it got worse when the price dropped to $19.95. The books kept multiplying, faster than I could read them.

When I finally realized the number of books I had meant I could open my own library branch, I went through all my books and made piles:
1. books I've read many times and will definitely read again
2. books that I had read once, and never read again
3. children's books that are worth collecting (original hardcovers, hard to find, etc)
4. children's books that aren't worth collecting (Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley, etc.)
5. books that I had never actually read (yes, I had some of those in my collection)
6. cookbooks
7. textbooks
8. comic books

I held onto the books in category 1, 3, and 8. I re-read favorites and I plan to one day be able to give my children some of my books, so I refused to get rid of those. And my comics just hold too special of a place in my heart to get rid of. The books in groups 2 and 4 were donated to my local library. Books in group 5 had mixed fates. If a book was in group 5, I would flip through it, and decide if it still was interesting. If it was, it stayed, but I had to read it within a month. If I didn't, it was to be donated to the library at the end of that month. Some of the books I decided not to keep, I decided to add to Bookcrossing (http://www.bookcrossing.com) and I must admit there was a certain joy in hearing a little boy yell, "Mommy! Look! A free book!"

Cookbooks provided me with another issue. I love cooking, and I especially love to bake. But I couldn't just keep collecting cookbooks - they took up two whole rows alone! I then sorted the cookbooks into three piles: books I referenced a lot, books I referenced sometimes, and the ones I never used. The ones I never used were immediately added to the "Give to Library" box. The books I used a lot were put back on the shelf. Then I went through the "sometimes" books and flagged each recipe that looked interesting. I scanned each interesting recipe and saved it as a PDF. Then the book was added to the "Give to Library" box. Time consuming, yes, but it let me keep those recipes to use. It also had the benefit of making it easy to share the recipe when it was asked for.

Textbooks- eek! They're heavy which absolutely sucks when moving and the schools change to new editions often enough to make getting a decent amount of money back from re-selling difficult. I do need to reference my textbooks in my line of work, but I sure didn't need to keep all of them. I sold what I could, and the others were donated to the library.

So, once I did that, I had to give myself a new book-buying policy. Thankfully, the used bookstore I mentioned earlier stopped their wonderful deal, so that temptation was removed from me. Then, I told myself that I was not allowed to buy a new book for myself for a year. If I went into a used bookstore, I could only buy hardcover original Trixie Belden books, hardcover Villains by Necessity, and Jonathan Wylie books that I didn't have. These books have been hard for me to find, and I told myself I wasn't allowed to look for these online, either, so there really hasn't been any trouble there.

The library has been wonderful for me. San Diego's library is pretty extensive, and I have access to two local university libraries, too. The best resource for books, though, has been my friends and coworkers. We've started lending each other books, and it allows us to talk about the books (instead of always talking work!)

Most of my library is made up of books of this description. Maybe what I should do is purge all books that I don't actively plan to read (or re-read), and then just purchase a book when I absolutely have to have it. What a novel idea.

I'm a biblioholic...

I bought a couple of penny books used through Amazon and the standard shipping means I actually paid $3.50 for them. I think it would take too long for me to find a buyer for some of them even at a penny so the ones I think will be okay reading, I plan to send to anysoldier.com listed soldiers who are currently serving in the middle east. I am also sending them my buffy dvds and unopened sunscreen.

On the topic of organizing and tracking collections (books, dvds, etc...) there's a website that an acquantance of mine started a few years back called Stuffopolis.com (formerly SuperBorrowNet.net). I've used it very little (I'm not a big book, cd, or dvd person and haven't really felt much of a need for it) but I have friends who were using it quite a bit. I haven't seen the acquantance who started it in at least a year so I'm not sure what the new exciting thing on there is but if you're looking for an alternative to desktop software I'd encourage you to check it out. You can even browse friends' collections (the parts of their collection they give you access to anyway) and request borrowing an item.