Seven Tips to dispose of books

                                Seven Tips to dispose of books

 

We accumulate books through buying, borrowing, gifts and other routes. Hardly ever do we think of getting rid of books that are read or the ones we do not need any more. De-cluttering is an important activity to invite inspiring thoughts to make us better. Well, you have lots of books and how do you weed them out of your shelves? Here are some tip:

 1.     Sell them away to “Raddi walah” or the waste paper merchant. He will be ready to come home, weigh the stuff and cart it away after paying you. Some guys are greedy and might cheat you on weighing but the loss won’t be heavy if you decide to ‘rid’ yourself of the load! Pease take care to see that books do not contain any important papers / letters that   you might have carelessly kept as bookmarks. Inserts in a book

2. Donate them to a library. It could be ‘For-profit’ type circulating libraries or those belonging to senior citizens associations or school / college libraries. You may need to segregate the books according to the recipient. Big public libraries may not show any interest in personal collections.

3. One easy way is to exhibit them decently on large tables during regular meetings of professional associations. Meeting participants might pick up what they want. The institution might arrange to transport the books if you can persuade them.

4.  Donate / gift them to individuals by adding suitable remarks telling why / how they may like it. 

5. If you have the time, energy and inclination you may engage in bookcrossing in the case of important books. Bookcrossing involves leaving your books in public spaces like park benches, train seats, bank counters etc with a slip that the picker of the book may read and keep it with him or re-circulate the book in a similar way.

6. Destroy the books that you will never need or that are found unusable. Take special care in the case of religious texts like Quorn, Bible, Gita etc. There are special requirements in such cases. For example, a copy of Quorn may be burnt, left to float in a river or buried.

7. Another trick is to ‘lend’ a large number of books to friends and relatives asking them to take their own time to ‘return’. And never insist on their coming back! In fact, in the case of one library, they had decided to move. They planned a one-month special lending mela when the number of books per member was trebled and they were asked to return borrowed books in the new building. Patrons eased shifting job to an unbelievable extent. This idea may work for individuals too.  

 If you have any suggestions, please share them with others and of course, me!

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