After our recent move to Tyler we’ve finally decided to reduce our book collection. We have about 2,000 books! After going through all the boxes we were only willing to part with about 600 books or so. (hey-it’s a start for us booklovers) We searched half.com and were stunned to see so many of our like new coffee table type books were only worth $0.75 at best! We’re talking nice books that originally retailed for $25+. Or course you know we didn’t pay anywhere near that, but still. We ended up listing only about 30 books with half.com, mostly old textbooks that are still selling for some crazy reason. When we browsed for used bookstores in town, we found that most had closed up shop entirely or had changed names (ownership), indicating the market isn’t much better here either.
We ourselves have patronized the library more and more in recent year and have purchased on books we really and truly wanted to have in our collection, but I still want libraries to be stocked with books for us to read. Beautiful books are being thrown away as useless pieces of junk instead of being treasured, both for their print and artwork. It honestly makes me sick at my stomach.
Has anyone else noticed the decline in actual books over recent years? Amazon reports they now sell more electronic books than paper. It seems so sad that we are moving away from “real” books that children can hold in their hands and flip through the pages of. What’s going to happen in the next few years? Are kids all going to have Kindle’s that they carry to class instead of books? It truly is disheartening. I feel like our kids are getting the short end of the stick. Anyone else with me on this one?
I have a difficult time parting with books, mostly kids books, myself. Just because they are “too old” to read them doesn’t mean I have to get rid of them! Don’t have to worry about shattering the screen if you drop them, or the batteries running out. I’m with you!
– S. Davis