What do you do with the books you have already read?

[Alli]

Do you keep them? Do you sell them? Do you give them away? Do you do something else with them?

I tend to keep them which results in my closet getting more and more packed with books lol. I guess I'm a bit of a pack rat.

[Sheila DeChantal]

The books I love - I keep. We used to have our office in the house. Last summer we moved the office out of the house and i was left with a large empty room with great lighting and wood floors.... walah! LIBRARY!
However, the books I chose not to keep I post on swaptree.com. There I can list books to give away in exchange for books i hope to read. All you pay is the shipping. I highly recommend checking it out. I have been on Swaptree for over a year now and have exchanged over 100 books i was done with for books I wanted.

[Angie]

I'm allergic to dust so I'm not supposed to keep around a lot of books, so I only keep the ones that I really love. After I read a book I ask myself "Is this bookshelf-worthy" and if it's not I either sell them or donate them.

[Lorri Slawson]

If they are paperbacks I take them to the library because they have a whole section for it and people take and give all the time. Hardbacks I usually pass on.

[Tall Stories - Fine Books for...]

I am a large hoarder of books. A wonderful large library makes me feel comfortable, safe & at home. I have an idea that I should be able to look up any subject that interests me, at home in my books, without going to the computer & I do. Almost all of the time, I manage to find what I want in my own books. I love reference books & thus have book cases full of them. Whenever I move I pack the books first (makes me feel as if I really have done stacks of work, when really I have just tackled the easy bit first) and they are the first things to be unpacked on the other side to make it feel like home. I am able to part with fiction more easily than non-fiction, but it is still difficult. I used to sell them to used shops. Generally, speaking, fiction books can always be found again in the big black hole of recycled books. It was heart-breaking to part with large chunks of my library when we started the shop & we had to put in stock. My 70 m2 home has not noticed the difference though. The advantage of a shop is that I have more books to read & I don't have to pay for them !

[Sarah]

I've just gotten 3 bags and 2 boxes of books out of my house and to a small local library. I decided to donate them to this library because the the librarian and assistant librarian have been so gracious and welcoming to me. I am only able to attend the book club there during the summer and just this past Friday both expressed how excited they were to have me back. That good will and their similar tastes and passion for books was all that I needed to know where my books next home should be.

[Renee Gardiner]

Some I share with friends, some get given away through Bookmooch, some are saved and some will probably end up in the library booksale

[Dave Rosenthal]

We get zillions of books at The Baltimore Sun. We review a few and give the rest to the local library or literacy groups. As for my own books, I can't bear to part with them, so I either give them to friends and relatives, or add them to the ever-growing assemblage of bookcases scattered around the house. I dread the day that we downsize from a house to a condo.

[Terri Quinn]

I used to keep all of my books, but have run out of bookshelves and husband is getting annoyed at the stacks piled on every available surface!

Have started donating books to my local library, and sometimes take in to a fellow reader at work. We have an informal book exchange shelf in our lunchroom that seems to work out well. But even with getting rid of 2 whole boxes recently, I still have 6 overstuffed bookcases!