I will echo what others have said. You will get much less than a $2/3 dollars per book. If you get .25 for each paperback, you are getting a great deal. The resale market for books is rather depressed. Look at how many books are selling for 0.01 on Amazon.
We will be facing this very issue with my in-laws home. My FIL has literally thousands of books (there are bookshelves in every room of the house) and some are valuable (antique) but the majority are not. It will be an enormous headache to get rid of them all. My FIL has passed and my MIL is keeping the house like a museum so very little of my FIL’s things are leaving the house now. When she passes, we will have an enormous amount of work to do to get the house ready for sale. Dealing with the books will be the biggest chore.
While he was living, books were my FIL’s passion but since he never got rid of any, they will be a millstone for his kids to deal with. I refuse to leave such a headache for my kids to deal with after I die.
The best thing that happened in this house is the KINDLE. No more books being purchased and stacked up on a weekly basis. The only new additions are Christmas gifts…and once they are read, they are donated elsewhere.
My inlaws tried to give us their extra bookshelves in a previous move. We declined…and so did everyone else. They went to Goodwill.
I agree @thumper1 . It was a friend of mine who works at the Huntington Library who told me to rid myself of what she called “your knowledge trophies” and embrace the digital age. With space at a premium, so many great libraries nearby and the vast internet available at my fingertips the actual books became redundant.
Reading about suggestions to hire a teenager has jogged my memory. An elderly neighbor who loves books has been asking about dad’s books and what was going to happen to them. This gentleman was good friends with my dad and they shared an interest in all kinds of books. I know I could trust him to flip through books as he was shopping for which ones he would want for himself, and he would kindly give us any cash he found.
I was thinking of offering him books at $1 per book, just to keep it simple. And hold back any $200 books we find.
Thanks to all for a reality check. I am hopeful for the first time that maybe we can survive this trauma. And yes, this experience has changed me forever. I am throwing out tons of stuff at my own home now, and bringing very few pieces home from my mom’s house. I don’t want my kids to inherit such a mess.
Oh, what is worth something and you might not know it is 1920’s-50’s pulp fiction, sci-fi, westerns and mysteries. There are collectors for that stuff. Comic books goes without saying. Good luck!
Also, perhaps you can do your elderly friend a favor and provide him with empty boxes, so that he can sort judiciously and save you another round of cleaning leftover books out – boxes for the recycling bin, boxes for the trash, boxes for the library donation, etc. as he picks out the ones he wants. Maybe offer him a $200 book as a kind gesture for the work he is helping you do and as a memento of his friendship with your father.
If you do find books that are still in good reading condition but won’t resell for anything, you can also see about donating to senior centers, after school clubs, etc.
Here’s yet another suggestion : Have a yard sale, just of books. Charge $5 bag. Book people can’t resist that sort of thing.Throw out the paperbacks that aren’t purchased (that’s all we do with them in libraries). Throw out “digest” books. Take what’s left and sell it for $10/box and media shipping (very cheap, very slow) on eBay or through craigslist. Do not donate them to your library. Presented with hundreds of titles that need to be processed and added, not to mention evaluated, a modern library will likely say NO to the whole lot. If you want to donate, pick 20 great hardbacks.
A used bookstore will want to go through the inventory – they can’t afford to have nonsellers, and have to pay tipping fees for what is thrown out. We had this same problem. (only it was PLATES! omg, like 320 of them! kitties and elvis and babies…yikes!)It doesn’t dishonor anyone, or their love of books, to just go with whatever is simplest and most efficient.
The best thing that happened in my house was the LIBRARY, and then the state-wide interlibrary loan system several years ago! I still have a ton of books to get rid of, but have bought very few in the past few years.
My ILs are hoarders — let me tell you, the best thing we can all do for our children is travel light through life. DH and I know a horrific estate problem awaits us.
I have a houseful, a large houseful of junk including books,and I don’t expect to get more than donation write offs for them. If you can get a book dealer to peruse the collection and make an offer, great. But I doubt he’ll look at every single book if there are so many, and if he hits the jackpot on a rare book that is worth a great deal, ti would be his bonanza, not yours. You need to do the work and find the gems to make it pay off.
I’m finding the same thing with MIL and mothers (and my) other junk as well, including jewelry. What do you think a cultured pin broach that cost hundreds is “worth” when you try to sell it and other such jewelry? The work it takes to get the pieces separated and assessed (expense as well) is costly in terms of time and money.
It took my brother 15 years to get rid of his comic collection and get top dollar for them. He became a dealer, buying to complete sets and gaining expert/assessor knowledge of the field and opening an Amazon shop. He told me that if he’d just taken the batch to a dealer, he’d have gotten hundreds, not the tens of of thousands he ended up getting, but if you throw in his hours of work, and expenses, the profit margin isn’t all that high, not to mention how long it took for him to get rid of it all.
Our library (the Friends of the Library not the library itself) would take all the books. They process thousands of books every year and have a bookstore in the library. YMMV.
Oh, I can get rid of the books and get a write off on them, Mathmom. A nice one, in fact. The Salvation Army gives you a blank receipt, and you can fill it all in yourself. Look up the books and and document values,and, you can be set for a nice tax deduction.
But getting anyone to pay anything to take them is a whole other story, or even come and take them all, if they are all stacked up to the rafter. The OP wants someone to sort through them, and offer a price, and evaluate any that might be valuable and get a good price for them. Not going to happen.
I just had my sons pull 100 books with certain parameters (recent high school, college texts, look for first editions, etc) and my son got about $40 for them through some text resale. But the other books had no market value in terms of someone buying them. But a used bookstore might haul them all away for a couple hundred if there are enough of them. But to get $2-3 per book would be tough, unless this is truly an unusual collection. If OP can get a bookstore owner to come and take a look and make an offer, that would be the way to find out.
In our area, Denver, some young men started a business where they will come by and clean out any part of your house for free. They will take the items for recycle or those items they find with value they post on ebay and will split the money with you. I forgot the breakdown of how they split the money.
Can I add my 2 cents?
If you neighbor comes over and helps with looking through the books, just give him the books. that he would like. Looking through old books is a dusty (assuming the books have not been regularly dusted - they can really get dusty!) and tiring job. Letting him have the books he wants is a small thank you for saving you a lot of work that you aren’t interested in doing yourself.
If you want to take the time (or have someone else who will spend the time) Powell’s Books has an online form where you can enter the ISBN number and you can find out if they will accept the book and the amount offered. They cover the shipping. http://www.powells.com/sell/
I believe that is what my son did ^. But it does involve someone with some interest and discernment going through every single book. OP doesn’t want to do this.
It’s a lot of work to get money out of used things. I have some “valuable” that can net what I consider substantial return but I don’t know if I want to go through the work. With the books…I won’t, can’t. I saw what it took to do 100 books.
I sympathize, especially regarding your need to maximize your mother’s estate value to help her with assisted living. if you are looking for value among her collectibles, your best bet would be among jewelry, silver, quality furnishings, vintage items. But, again, each item will require assessment and evaluation.
If you have enough to worry about, there are people who conduct whole-house estate sales for a fee. If not, concentrate on categories like the jewelry – you aren’t likely to come anywhere close to “retail” value or anything but use a magnifying glass to look for gold content like “14K” or “10K” stamps. If you have enough scrap gold, you can take those pieces to those gold liquidators. I did that with MIL’s many miscellaneous, broken jewelry and mismatched earrings, etc., then deposited funds in estate account. Silver, if it’s not cutlery that has separate value, has melt-down value also.
Mathmom…please tell me who wants 1000 paper back science fiction books…collected from 1975 PE so to about 2010. I have them…all boxed up. Free to the first one who comes to haul them away.
Powercropper…offer your neighbor books for an amount per bag or box. You will get rid of more that way. $2 a bag maybe?
I agree that charging the neighbor $1 per book is FAR too much. Let him take what he wants.
I am a bibliophile, and the idea of books, especially vintage books, being thrown out physically pains me.
I would suggest to you that if the man was a book collector, it is HIGHLY unlikely that the books he valued most were consigned to boxes. I’d concentrate on the shelves.
I like the idea of having a book sale at $5 per bag or box. Book lovers adore that kind of thing.
