All Books Aloud

Is it ever okay to throw away books?

• Elizabeth Brookbank & Martha Brookbank • Season 1 • Episode 12

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What do you do with books that you're finished with? Books you've read or don't want anymore or spilled coffee on? In this episode we discuss what makes a book valuable - to individuals and to society - and why this can sometimes result in anxiety about how books are disposed of. 

We dig into the work libraries do to preserve books and the “weeding” they have to do to stay functional for the communities they serve. Elizabeth goes on a teeny-tiny rant about the controversy this weeding can sometimes cause, but why it should be embraced rather than resisted or feared. We also talk about various options for how and where to unload books you don't want anymore, and ideas for reading more sustainably. Don't miss it!
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Books we're reading in this episode:   

The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes
The Gentleman's Gambit  (A League of Extraordinary Women series book #4) by Evie Dunmore
My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme
House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City #3) by Sarah J. Maas
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Sources:

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Intro and outro music: "The Chase," by Aves.

Do you have thoughts, questions, or ideas for future episodes? Email us at allbooksaloudpod@gmail.com. And if you want to learn more about the podcast, visit our website at allbooksaloudpod.com.

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And if you'd like to see more bookish content from Martha & Elizabeth, follow us on Instagram and TikTok @allbooksaloudpod.

Read on!

[[All Books Aloud intro and theme music]]

Mar: Hey Liz, how are you doing today?

Liz: Hi, Martha. I'm okay. Feeling a little harried, but doing okay.

Mar: Good, good. What are you reading? 

Liz: I'm reading a book called The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellows. Jessica Fellows wrote a few, quite a few actually, I want to say. Companions to Downton Abbey, [00:01:00] and The Mitford Murders was her first novel, but it's a series now. 

 I'm liking it, but I'm not loving it.

 So we'll see if I keep reading it , but it basically opens with the murder of Florence Nightingale, the nurse, Florence Nightingale,

Mar: Oh, yeah.

Liz: I don't, I need to look up if she actually was murdered in real life, or if that is a fictionalized part.

Mar: Yeah. I don't think she was.

Liz: I have yet to see how that storyline really ends up dovetailing with the main storyline, which is of a young woman who is poor and lives in London and has a really bad home situation. Her uncle lives with her and her mom. After her dad died and he is a creep and tries to get her to be a prostitute basically So she has this really terrible home situation and gets a chance to [00:02:00] apply to be a nursery maid slash governess for the Mitfords, which are a real life aristocratic family in England, well known.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: Mitford, I believe actually was a novelist. And so there are real people that are characters in this book, but it is fiction. So it's interesting. And like I said, I've been liking it, but,

Mar: Not loving

Liz: yeah, it started out a little slow because I feel like it's hard to see how the things are all going to be related, so maybe I just need

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: to give it a chance. So , that's my physical book, and then I'm listening to The Gentleman's Gambit by Evie Dunmore, which is the last in that series.

Mar: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Liz: And I also am not loving that, although I'm definitely going to keep going with it because I love the other books so much.

And I also had the same experience of reading the third book, [00:03:00] Portrait of a Scotsman, which ended up being my favorite book of the series, but I just didn't really love it in the beginning.

I'm definitely going to keep going with it because I think

it will get better.

Mar: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely I didn't love it, probably the first two thirds, but then as you get deeper into it, it kind of wins you over, but it's definitely not my favorite. It's probably my least favorite of the series, but I liked them all a lot, so it's not a bad thing that it's my least favorite.

If that makes sense. But, um, just FYI, according to Wikipedia, Florence Nightingale was not murdered. She died peacefully in her sleep. So,

just, just so we make sure we have that

Liz: I was a little bit horrified. I was like, oh my god, Florence Nightingale was not murdered on a train, was she? , that would be so sad.

Mar: Yeah, sad and like, how could we not know that? If, if we miss that part [00:04:00] of history, that would be a pretty big omission. But

Liz: it is a novel. It's fiction. So

obviously that is part of the, part of the artistic license that the author has taken. What about you? What are you reading right now?

Mar: I'm reading My Life in France by Julia Child. Yes, with help from her great nephew Alex Prudhomme. , Liz got me this for Christmas, or my birthday. One of the two. They kind of run together in my mind.

Liz: it for you for Christmas, but I failed so I told you you should buy it.

Mar: Yeah, but I bought it with a gift card

Liz: with the gift card that I got you for your birthday.

Mar: So you got it for me, technically.

 And I am really enjoying it. It's been a slower read for me. It's very cute. I love reading about her and Paul and their relationship and their time. , it's been a great read, but just a little slower because it's about their lives. It's a character read. It's not like a fast read.

plot that's, it's definitely not a page turner. So [00:05:00] it's one of those that I'm just reading a few pages before bed every night and I'm really enjoying it, but it's taken me a little time to get through. And then I'm listening to the long awaited House of Flame and Shadows, the third book in the Crescent City series by Sarah J.

Maas,

which I think I said I was on the fence whether or not I wanted to read it right away. Or maybe that was Rebecca Yaros. But ultimately I couldn't wait and I didn't want to have FOMO and see spoilers online.

Liz: I was going to say you don't want it to be spoiled and people talk about those books so much.

Mar: Yeah. I'm loving it.

I mean, in true Sarah J Maas fashion, every chapter something happens and you're like, Oh my God, it's really good. And it's fast paced. , I'm listening to it. And it's 28 hours long.

And I'm already, I'm already 14 hours in. And I think I just started it last week. So yeah, it's really [00:06:00] good.

I have decided, I've made the decision,

Liz: Momentous.

Mar: I don't think it's romantasy. I really don't. I think it's just a fantasy book with a love story subplot and if a man had wrote it, I don't think it would be even a question if it was fantasy or romantasy. So that's my hot take for the first half of this book.

Liz: Yeah. Apropos, our last episode. Well, I mean, I think that I, even before the romance episode, I took issue with this romantasy thing anyway, because it's not a real genre in the sense that it's not a genre that, the publishing industry recognizes. And so, that doesn't matter so much. Obviously, when readers are talking about it, if they want to call it romantasy, whatever, I mean, I don't care, but in terms of how it's categorized and [00:07:00] how it's shelved, it definitely seems like it fits more into fantasy in terms of the quote unquote official genres.

Yeah.

Mar: this really funny and clever woman made this tick tock or real I don't remember which about Someone saying that Sarah J Maas books were smut, and she calculated the amount of sex in the books, by a percentage. Like, this many pages has a sex scene, and there's this many pages of the book.

And I forget exactly, I'm gonna butcher it, I forget what the percentages were. Basically her take was like, if you're recommending a book to me that has less than 30% smut in it, it's not smut. don't even try and pass it off as smut to

me. Which I thought was, yeah, , I thought that was a really good point because she's right.

, overall, compared to other books in the genre, this, it's not, it's not smut.[00:08:00] 

Liz: Yeah. I sort of remember that it was like 3 percent or something really small.

Mar: Yeah. Yeah. It definitely, it was. Even I was surprised because, I don't know, just the way that people talk about it, even though I've read them, I know what's in it. There's like one chapter in A Court of Mist and Fury that's really steamy that everyone talks about. And other than that, it's fantasy.

So anyway.

Liz: Well, it's also really, that part is really interesting too, because that is such a relative thing. I mean, obviously, you can put numbers to it. So if you're talking about percentage of pages, that is more objective. But what one person feels like is really spicy,

Mar: hmm. Mm 

Liz: another person might not. And what one person thinks is smut, another person, you know what I mean?

 These terms are not. scientific terms and it all depends on like we were talking about in the romance episode how prudish you are how you grew up how what your attitude towards sex is and [00:09:00] what type of books you read maybe you read a romance novel that you feel like is really spicy because it's the spiciest thing you've read but i guarantee you there are spicier out

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: are reading you know what i mean 

Mar: Yeah. 

Liz: yeah It's

all so relative

Mar: It's just, yeah, it's funny. But anyway, that long story short, yes, it's very good and I'm enjoying it. So that's what I'm reading.

Liz: good

Mar: so our topic today, we are going to talk about books as objects. Is it ever okay to throw away a book? And where's the value in books? 

Liz: Yeah, this topic comes up almost constantly since I've become a librarian. I have such a rant about this. There's a lot to say and a lot to unpack. 

Mar: Yeah, so I came up with a list of things that I think makes a book valuable. One, obviously being the [00:10:00] content of the book, the ideas, the plot, the story, the writing, the reading experience, a lot of the things that we talk about with story doorways, right, and the content of the book, and empathy, the benefits of reading that we've talked about at length already in our previous episodes.

I feel like those are all of the things that really make Books in general valuable the exception to that being first editions or rare editions, bringing some physical value to a book, if it's a rare book or, you know, Maybe sentimental value, if you have a book that you've had since childhood, or it's been passed down through generations of your family, I could see that bringing personal value to a book.

But am I on the right track here? What do you think from your librarian's [00:11:00] perspective, Liz?

Liz: Well, yeah, I think that you're completely right, and I think that anyone who really answers this question truthfully, , that has to be the answer. Books are valuable because what's inside them,

Mar: Mm

Liz: right? everything that you said, , the experience of reading, the ideas in the book, the story that you're reading, The writing, the beauty of the words and the way they're put together, that's what books are.

The objects , yeah, , there are some books that are valuable because they're a first edition, because they're, really beautifully made with expensive materials, but Those things could be divorced from it being a book, right? , other things are valuable because they're made with expensive materials, or because they're really old, or because they're rare, right?

 Those are not specific to books. Those are the reasons that anything is monetarily valuable in our society. [00:12:00] 

What is valuable about books are what is inside of them. It's the concepts, the ideas, the stories that are between the covers. So this is the part that just makes me crazy. I think that it's so obvious to me.

 Maybe it's not obvious to everyone. And , I accept that my perspective is my perspective, but it just seems so obvious to me. That that is the case the reason that the printing press and mass literacy in the West was such a huge deal was such a seismic shift for humanity and for the way that the world was ordered right when there were a lot of books Suddenly being printed and more than just monks and the very elite were able to access them and started to learn to be able to read them all of that followed one from another. The reason that that was such a big deal is not because all of a sudden people have these beautiful objects to put [00:13:00] on their shelves in their homes. Right? The reason it was such a big deal is because this whole world of knowledge was opened up to people. And, not to get too dorky, but specifically what was opened up to people was the ability to read the Bible and to see in the Bible that the words that were actually in the Bible were different from what their priests had been telling them for the, for the 

last, , however many centuries.

 With Tinsdale, Dale's Bible is the first English language, accessible general language translation of the Bible , that was produced in England and people started reading it and were like, wait a minute. This doesn't say anything about paying priests,

Mar: mm hmm.

Liz: or letting them have, all this power, you know.

And that , honestly, because society at that time, and again, I'm mostly talking about Western society, but society at that time was much more religious. , that was the organizing principle of society was religion. And so that was, the main reason that it was so, impactful to culture and [00:14:00] to our society.

So , it's just not, 

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: about the book. It's about what the book is

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: about.

Mar: It's the inner beauty, right?

Liz: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the pages are a vehicle of delivery. And you can tell already, I get really worked up about this, but , this is very much a librarian soapbox that I'm on, I.

I obviously have always loved books and have always been a reader, but I can't claim to have thought about this topic in any depth before I became a librarian, 

but when I was in library school, it wasn't the first day, but definitely within the first week of my graduate program, we learned about the five laws of library science by Ranganathan is say this person's name.

 And it's basically the [00:15:00] organizing principles for operating a library. And there are expansions and criticisms and everything to this, 

it was from the 1930s. So,, just take that for what it is. But, I think that it is still, is very applicable and it's very simple which is why I like it and why I remembered it, I think, because I certainly don't remember everything that I learned in my graduate program. So, these are the five laws.

Books are for use. Books are for use.

Mar: Mm-Hmm.

Liz: Every reader, his or her book, every book it's reader, save the time of the reader, and the library is a growing organism. So, books are for use is pretty straightforward, right? It's what we've been talking about. Like, books are not just for sitting on a shelf. They're for reading.

Mar: Mm-Hmm.

Liz: , every reader, his or her book, and that's very gender binary, obviously, but again, 1930s, 

every reader, their book and every book, its reader is basically what we have talked about a lot on this podcast with all of my [00:16:00] references to Nancy Pearl, which is just,

there's a book out there for every reader. 

 

Mar: No two readers read the same book kind of

Liz: Yeah. And, there is a book. to suit every reading taste, basically. And being a librarian is to facilitate that happening.

Mar: Got it?

Liz: Save the time of the reader, whatever, is pretty straightforward.

That's not as applicable to this conversation. But then, the last one, the library is a growing organism, is very applicable to this conversation as well, as the book

of your use. Because, one of the common misconceptions that I certainly have confronted as a librarian is that people don't actually understand What libraries are for and this is especially the case if they are not heavy library users,

Mar: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

Liz: we have learned recently with my research episode and that news article that was going around a lot of millennials and Gen Z, younger people are using libraries that much higher rates than older generations.

And so hopefully this is changing, but a lot of people [00:17:00] don't actually really understand what a library is for. They have this stereotypical ideal. In their mind, and I say ideal as opposed to idea, because it is an idea, but it's sort of this romanticized

Mar: version.

Liz: of a library, so it's just this idyllic, bucolic, you know, librarians with cat eye glasses and cardigans, 

Mar: Mm 

Liz: you know, it's the idea that it's just about the books, that it's this, storage locker 

Mar: Right, right.

Liz: which is not the case.

 Libraries are they're communities. They're, , like this says they're a growing organism. They're meant to serve whatever the people who are around that library who are using it need

Mar: mm

Liz: before the difference between the different libraries. And so that also means that the books that they have. should change with the needs of the people. And so, you know, [00:18:00] just be a warehouse

for books indefinitely.

Mar: Well, I think some of the anxiety around this topic is that some people just don't know, or they're curious, or they're fearful that If they throw physical books away, Is there a chance that society will lose that knowledge that's in that book?

 Is every book that ever came into existence digitally catalogued now? , I would almost assume that that was the case, but I, I , I don't know. , so I feel like that's part of it, they don't know how many copies of a book there are in the world, and what if we throw them all away?

Liz: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and to be clear, , I am not completely without empathy for people who get upset about this, right? , I'm obviously being a little bit ranty about this because it's a little bit of a pet peeve. But yeah, I get that [00:19:00] anxiety. And, , again, going back to what we were talking about, , People's fear of, , throwing books away, is a similar fear to, , the idea of, , people burning books.

But, , the reason that you are upset by that is not because they're burning the physical objects of the books,

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: right? , if they're burning, math textbooks from the 1970s, that's not upsetting, right? It's not actually just that it's a book that

Mar: Right. 

Right. It's 

not just the physical thing.

Liz: it's the idea that a book is being burnt or being thrown away, put in the dumpster, that has value and that we are losing something 

by that happening.

So yeah, I think that you definitely have put your finger , on the source of that. The answer to your question is Well, it can be both short and long, so basically, not every book is digitally catalogued, no, or digitized, 

not catalogued, but I think what you're talking about is , is every book in the world available on the internet,[00:20:00] 

right, digitized, , a digital version of it available, and the answer is definitely no, it's not, however, this gets back to, , a lot of people don't really understand what libraries do, , before the internet existed.

Mar: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Liz: were libraries, and for a very long time, libraries have been doing the work of preserving books. So, even books that aren't digitized, there are copies of books in various different libraries, There are, at multiple levels, this is the case. There are national libraries, like the Library of Congress, although it's not technically a national library, it serves as our national library, or the British Library in England, where the mission of that library is to collect and preserve a copy of every book that's published in that country. So that is the case for the Library of Congress, for the British Library, for other national libraries is that all of the books that are published in that country, they exist there, at least. And then there are [00:21:00] also other libraries that , also would duplicate that work. So a large research university library, for instance.

Part of its mission will be to preserve certain fields of knowledge or areas of knowledge, so even if those books never get used, they're not going to get rid of them, weed them a little bit, when we are talking about the library as a growing organism and that it needs to change the books that it has to fit with the people that are using it, the process of doing that is called weeding.

, in the same way that you go into your garden and pluck out the weeds or pluck out the dead plants, that's the concept of weeding a library is that you get rid of the books that you don't need anymore for whatever reason. Either people aren't reading them, or they're damaged, or they're, , outdated, case maybe.

But the strategy of weeding a library is going to be different depending on the [00:22:00] mission of the library. So, , the Library of Congress doesn't because the whole point of it is that it's preserving all of the books that are published, , a large research university is for the most part not going to weed because part of its mission is to preserve the academic knowledge in the areas that it collects. Those libraries are usually huge and have huge storage warehouses so that they can keep all of these books, right? Whereas a small public library, or any public library system really, is not going to have that as part of its mission because the mission of a public library is to serve the public in its area.

with whatever that public wants to read , at whatever point, if the public library in your town kept all of the books that it ever had, it would not be useful to you as a public library because you would go in there and there would be books from like 1925 [00:23:00] and it doesn't have infinite space.

 Public libraries are usually small, so either it would have to stop buying books at a certain point or we would be swimming in all of these books from

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: previous decades, right? , it has to be an evolving collection that is weeded and refreshed for the patrons that it's serving at any given time.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: In my library system, which is A middle ground between those two examples. It's a medium sized university that is a teaching university. It's not a research university, so we, part of our library's mission is not necessarily to preserve that research capacity, 

we're a teaching university, so we mostly are interested in keeping things in our library that our faculty are going to need to teach their classes on any given year.

Now, we still don't weed very much because we still have library, we still have faculty that are doing research and they would, ideally like to have the books that they need for their research [00:24:00] in our library. And we are pretty big, and so we don't really need to weed that much, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.

But, in the system that we're a part of, there is a rule that, in the consortium, there need to be at least five copies of every book. So, if you're going through and you want to weed a book, if there are fewer than five copies in the system, you don't get to weed it, you have to keep it. Because that's our rule to make sure that every book that we have in our system is, available for people to check out if they want it.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: So that's the long answer. The short 

Mar: Yeah. 

Liz: answer is people, librarians have got this. , this is our job, we are experts, we have been doing this for a long time before the internet existed, and we will continue to do it after the internet doesn't exist anymore. , It's okay,

right, , chill out,

Mar: Yeah, so you, the listener, the [00:25:00] individual, you don't have to feel like this comes down to you, you're not gonna save these books from extinction, essentially. , if you have a book on your shelf that is no longer serving you, it's damaged, it's unreadable, whatever the case is, , It's okay to release that in whatever way you deem appropriate, which we could talk about a little bit.

Yeah, you don't have to take this mission up because librarians got your back.

Liz: yeah, yeah, we have got you boo. Also, please don't get mad at us,

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: mad at us for throwing,

Mar: That happens,

Liz: oh my god, it happens, yeah, I have this story. This is a recent example from last year but , I could literally find, however many stories. I actually tweeted a similar photo I'll let you open it. It basically [00:26:00] is this news story of, the headline is, residents outraged over dumpster filled with library books. at the UWGB, University of Wisconsin Green Bay.

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: From January of 2024, it actually is more recent than I thought.

Mar: Oh, very recent. Yeah.

Liz: And in 2018 or 2019, I tweeted a photo similar to this that was a big dumpster outside of an academic library that was filled with books and was like, this is the reality of running a library.

You have to weed.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: This is part of it. , it's okay, , stop freaking out about this. And it was the closest I've ever come to a tweet going viral. Like,

Mar: your librarian hot take. Yeah.

Liz: yeah, , people get so worked up about this. And again, I mean, I think it goes back to what you were saying about the anxiety of, , what this represents.

But, [00:27:00] if you look closely at this dumpster, you can see that the books To me, mainly look like old textbooks. 

So get mad at the textbook publishers for this, because what they do in order to make money is publish a new edition of their textbook, every year or two. So that then students have to buy a new 85 textbook because their professor requires that they have the latest edition of it.

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: Why does the library need to keep all of the editions of this textbook that have gone in perpetuity?

Mar: ,

No. 

It's such a waste. It's 

Liz: It is a waste. Certainly it is a waste. But the answer is not for the libraries to keep it, right, because no one is using those old editions of the textbook. The photo that I tweeted that people got so upset about was mainly, bound volumes of old academic journals. So , one of the things that libraries do [00:28:00] with physical copies of academic journals is that in order to maintain them and keep them from getting worn out, They'll take four or five of the paper magazines and put them between hardcovers.

So , it looks like a book, but it's actually four or five, , issues of an academic journal

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: full of scholarly articles reporting on the results of academic research it's not something that you're just gonna pick up and read. Most of the time, if libraries are getting rid of those bound journals, it's because they have digital versions of all of those articles in their databases.

Sometimes, , multiple duplicate databases

will have the digital versions of those articles. And, Even though people for their recreational leisure reading are still really attached to physical books, people, like we talked about in my research episode, , the majority of people really like to read physical books for their recreational reading.

That is [00:29:00] not the case for academic reading. 

 Far and away people prefer having pdfs of those academic articles when they have to read them. That goes for students and for faculty that are using them for their research because it's a lot easier to control f and find a term or you know read it on different devices.

So no one is using those physical copies of those journals. It's just that image of books in a dumpster. Is, , a journalist's dream of, getting people to react to their news story and 

Mar: Yeah. Definitely. 

So what do the libraries do when they weed?

Books. I mean, do they just throw 'em away or is there anything else that you guys do first to go through the books that you don't want in the library

Liz: Thank you for asking that question because I just jumped straight to the , I'm so ranty about this topic.

Mar: right to the controversy

Liz: But no. [00:30:00] Of course, , that's not the first step. And it's actually the last resort. Yeah.

Mar: Mm-Hmm.

Liz: A library will have exhausted a lot of other options before they actually put books in a dumpster. So again, this depends on the library and on its mission and on what type of books it has and also on the rules that bind it.

But, for the most part, libraries will have book sales, right? , this is mainly a public library thing, but we even do this. , every couple of years we'll have a book sale in one of the classrooms in our library, and people can come by and buy the book. For, you know,

Mar: Nothing.

Liz: a pittance, yeah,

which public library book sales are the same, and those are great because the money goes back to the library, , and it helps support the library, which, especially public libraries, really need that because they tend to be very underfunded by

Mar: Mm-Hmm.

Liz: local governments, , and I think that the books that [00:31:00] we sell in our book sale maybe go into our foundation account, which , we have more freedom in how we can use it, so , we can use it for lots of different things.

Whereas, we can't just give our books to, , a used bookstore, say. Because we are funded by the state, and this is the case for a lot of academic libraries. , there are limits to the things that they can do with books that they don't want anymore, because , they're funded by the state, and so the books are technically state property, and you can't make, a profit off of selling state property usually there are very a very good reason for those laws I'm sure it wasn't made for library books,

Mar: For books? Yeah.

Liz: it was made to keep people from being super corrupt and Selling a property to make a profit, but the result of that is that there are a lot of academic libraries. There are only certain things that you can do with the books. 

, one thing that I know academic libraries do, I'm not sure about public [00:32:00] libraries, but there is an organization called Better World Books. 

And there probably are other organizations that do a similar thing, but this is the one that I know of, and I think it's the biggest one in this space. But basically, they take book donations from libraries, maybe other places too, but definitely from libraries, that they're getting rid of, and give them to people in other countries who need them. Which is great, they're a non profit organization, right? , that is a wonderful thing. It's not like they just take anything and, dump it off 

on people, though. They have very strict guidelines about what they accept in terms of the content of the book, and also in terms of the, , physical condition of the book, the type of book, you know.

Mar: mm-Hmm.

Liz: You know, what people want, what they're going to use it for, if it's going to a school, they might want certain subjects, , just because people are living in a country that isn't as wealthy and privileged as the U. S. doesn't

mean that they just want, , all of our trash, [00:33:00] right?

Mar: Yeah. Definitely

Liz: So, there is Better World Books, they do exist, and they're a great organization, but that is also not the answer for getting, You know for getting rid of 

Mar: everything. 

Liz: need to get rid. Yeah, but my library. I know sends books to them so we'll go through all of those Different avenues of getting rid of the books before we throw them away Libraries basically only throw away books when they have to, 

either when they are physically destroyed or when no one wants them or when there's nothing else that we can do with them because of the laws that I was talking about earlier. So it is kind of a last resort, but it does happen, right? Sometimes it has to happen. We have to get rid of some books.

 I looked it up quickly before this episode and it was just really quick. So take it with a grain of salt. I looked at Wikipedia and a couple of other places like that. But , it basically, it looks like to me, there are between three and four million books published [00:34:00] per year in the world.

And that doesn't mean copies of books, individual books.

Mar: Wow. Wow.

Liz: And then think about all the books, , that are New York Times bestsellers that there are like tens of millions of copies or, hundreds of millions of copies sold. , , we would be drowning in books if we didn't get rid of some of them.

Just too many physical objects.

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: Never throw them away.

Mar: Definitely, and I think some people are drowning in their old books and don't know what to do with them, so I'm glad that we're talking about this. So, on a personal level, I know that you read a lot of library books, so you might not have I don't have like as many physical books lying around your house as other readers, but what do you do with your personal books that you don't want anymore?

Liz: yeah. I was [00:35:00] laughing because, obviously I love books. And anyone who listens to this podcast, I feel like that is not something that anyone could seriously accuse me of, , not loving books. But my husband Alex teases me all the time about how I don't actually like books. because, because he's heard me go on this rant before and also I don't really keep a lot of physical books in my house.

I don't buy books. I really like going into bookstores. I like looking

Mar: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. but I don't really buy books and I don't like to keep them in the house unless they are special for some reason, so I have one bookcase that is mostly full of books that grandma gave to me.

Liz: Um, or left to me when she died.

And I have a couple of other books that have sentimental value to me, but , those are kind of the only books that I have in my house.

Mar: [00:36:00] Yeah, which I think is great that it's so sustainable. I love it. I think it's 

great. 

Liz: it's funny though, because it's not, again, we're going back to this stereotypical ideal that people have of and librarians, 

you know, it's not the image. I think that people would have of a librarian's house. It's not full. Books. It's just not,

Mar: You don't have a library in your home.

Liz: no. Cause I go to a library and I can have any book I want. And 

I love freedom. I love what we've talked about before. I don't buy books that I don't know I'm going to like, I

love the freedom to be like, I don't like this. And I didn't pay 20 for it. Not going to

Mar: So I'm gonna stop reading it. Yeah. Totally.

Liz: , The one exception to that is that I do have a shelf of books that is books that I got for free or was given in various different situations, mostly at librarian conferences, they will give away books a lot of times, especially the bigger [00:37:00] ones, publishers will go to them and give advanced reader copies to librarians because they're making decisions about whether to buy the book for their system most of the time.

, I never was, but they don't know that. They just give them to anyone who's at the conference.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: I have quite a few books that I got that way. That I keep because I like to have a physical TBR that aren't library books to take with me on a trip but , if I start reading them and I don't like them, I will stop and get rid of it if I finish reading it and I liked it fine, but it wasn't a book that I want to keep.

I don't feel like it was life changing. I don't plan on reading it again. Then I will get rid of it. I bring bags of books to, , use bookstore, that's how I like to get rid of my books

if I can, or to the library, , for their book sale, because public libraries usually will take whatever books you want to donate for their book sale and The ones that are sellable, they'll put in the book sale, and the ones that aren't, they'll do the work [00:38:00] of getting rid of.

Mar: Yeah. In some way. Yeah.

Liz: Yeah, in the ways that we've talked about

Mar: Yeah. Yeah.

Liz: So yeah, that's , what I do with the physical books that I have.

Mar: Mm hmm. , mine's very similar. , I do buy books more often. Like we've talked about, , I'll buy the books for my book club because I'm doing it with the local bookstore and it give them business. And that's kind of the whole point of , the book club and yada, yada.

So I do tend to buy more books I am a little sentimental with the books that I love, so I will usually hang on to them unless I really didn't like them and if I didn't like them and I think that they could make a good gift, there's a potential there, but. But, , going back to do books make good gifts, I try to use those principles.

So I'm not just going to give a book away to a friend because I don't want it. If it's not a book that makes sense for them to have, I'm not just going to give it to them because I don't want to deal [00:39:00] with getting rid of it. So potentially gifting books, I like to sell to the used bookstores too.

That's a big one. A lot of times I'll donate to the thrift store. My local thrift store because, again, I like to shop at the thrift store for books. , I've shared that on some of our stories in the past on Instagram. I love going to Bishop's Attic and buying a book for 2 that's in perfect condition that someone didn't want.

So, I do that quite often. But, again, the thing about the thrift stores is that if the books don't sell there, they take them to the recycling center. So they do go away if no one else wants them. , and then that's the last thing I was going to say, is that technically our recycling center doesn't advertise that they take books, but if they get books , they can recycle them as mixed paper.

So, at [00:40:00] least you're, you're keeping them out of the landfill so it's better than just throwing them away. If that's an option in your town, the listener, that might be something that you could look into.

If you're concerned about the environmental impact of throwing books away into the landfill, , check and see if you can recycle them.

Liz: that's great. I actually had no idea , now that I, you say it, it totally makes sense, but I never really thought about that. I mean, because I just, , let the bookstores and the library , do that work

for me. It's totally fine, , you can do that, but yeah, you were saying, you have to know that that's what's happening.

, thank goodness that that's what's happening, because that thrift store or that library wouldn't be usable if they never threw anything away. Like think about it, they kept all the clothes that people donated to them. I mean,

 People bring things to thrift stores all the time that they just don't want to throw away.

, they don't want to do the emotional labor of throwing it away. Which,, I understand, [00:41:00] but you would not want your thrift store to put everything that people bring to the thrift store out on the shelves. , that would not be a usable space.

Mar: No.

Liz: So the same thing, the same principle exists , with books. Not every book is resellable for whatever reason.

Mar: Yeah. And I know for a fact that a lot of the clothing from the thrift stores ends up at the recycling center too, and they recycle textiles. So it is something that I think is worth considering. is the environmental impact, just like anything, right? Like clothing, food, I mean, we as a society have a big problem with overproducing, overconsumption in general, and reading is a good example of an area where we can, , try and be a little more mindful with the way that we consume these books.

 So there's a few ways that we can read more sustainably, if that's something that you're [00:42:00] invested in or curious about, or if that's part of the reason why you're , someone who's against throwing away books. , obviously, the low hanging fruit, the obvious answer is using the library, checking books out from your local library. Audiobooks and using e readers, that's another big one that we've talked about a lot on the podcast. Reading apps like Libby, so if you're trying to be sustainable and also save money, Libby is a great app, you just have to have a library card and you can digitally check out thousands, if not millions, I don't really know how many books they have in their catalog.

Liz: Yeah, I don't know if a lot of people know that it, again, if you're not a user of the library, you might not know that libraries have apps and digital interfaces for books. So Libby is one example, but a [00:43:00] lot of public libraries also use something called OverDrive.

Academic libraries use different things, the app that we use at my library for the recreational books is called Boundless. , there's all sorts of Apps and platforms for reading and listening to books that libraries use. So , it's not just that if you are checking out a library book, you have to check out a physical book.

If you prefer to read ebooks or listen to audiobooks, you can get those through the library too.

Mar: Mm hmm. Yeah, there's so many great ways now. And then, of course, like we already mentioned, shopping at the used bookstores, the thrift stores. , there's lots of ways to get used books, for sure, which I'm sure most people already are aware of in their community. And Yeah, like we already talked about, recycling.

You can recycle books that you no longer want. It, that might be the last ditch effort before you just throw it away is bring it to a recycling center. Is there anything else I'm missing?[00:44:00] 

Liz: I mean, I really think that this is a great way to wrap up this episode because for me, this is the point of the process to focus on, right? , if you get upset about the idea of throwing books away, And we haven't convinced you that it's really okay.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: Then the place to focus your efforts is up the chain,

 before the book is able to be thrown away, right? Thinking about maybe how do we buy less? No judgment to people who buy books. I'm not doing that. But, , if this is something that you're worried about, like thinking about buying fewer books or Helping yourself and others in your community read more sustainably, that's the place to focus 

Liz: your efforts, as opposed to once you're so downstream that you have a book that is literally trash

Mar: Yeah.

Liz: and needs to be recycled, like that's not the point at which we should be focusing our efforts on it.[00:45:00] 

 The only other thing that I thought of. It's a little bit of a cheeky one, but I ran across this artist on social media that makes these really beautiful art pieces from books. And I am assuming, but I'm not sure, that she uses books that are not good for any other use.

I don't know that, but I put a link to it in the outline.

Did you get a chance to look at it? Here,

Mar: Oh, no, I haven't but I will look at it.

Liz: I'll send it to you in the chat. They're really beautiful, and this is just one example. I've seen, ,

I've seen this type of art before. , basically, she carves. A scene into the book.

Mar: Mm hmm.

Liz: Maybe 

we can share , this picture when the episode comes out so that people can see what we're looking at.

But basically you open the book and there is a scene drawn on the inside [00:46:00] cover and then the rest of the book is carved out in a 3D way to make this really pretty meadow of flowers and a forest. I just love the creativity of that, and I love the message this object is an object,

Mar: Yeah,

Liz: and it could be, turned into something else, and something beautiful, and it's okay, 

Mar: . I love that idea. And like you said, Liz, this episode is not meant to shame anyone. , really, we want to talk about this so that we could alleviate some of the anxiety and the mystery around this topic.

And if you want to keep buying books and reading them and saving them and Throwing them away when you don't want them anymore, we understand, but if you want to Consider how you can read more sustainably and what to do with your books when you no longer want them We hope that [00:47:00] this helped answer some of your questions

Liz: Yeah, and I, you know, I got a little bit up on my high horse about it, but I do really hope that for people that just didn't know what libraries do and all of the things that they consider and all of the things that they're thinking about as they go through this process of weeding books, I hope that can maybe give people some comfort who maybe didn't realize

that this was happening behind the scenes.

 Librarians are trained to, to do this type of work, , and really put a lot of effort and thought into how it's done. It's not haphazard. It's not something that people are just flying by the

seat of their pants, you know. So, yeah, , I hope that is something that now that people know that, They can take comfort from that, that the librarians are here.

Mar: hmm. They got your back

Liz: care of your books. Yeah.

Mar: Awesome. [00:48:00] Well, thanks for talking about this with me today Liz

Liz: Yeah. Thank you.

Mar: If you haven't listened to our other episodes, I encourage you to go back in the archives we have going and give some of the other episodes a listen. Make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you never miss an episode.

You can follow us on Instagram and TikTok at allbooksaloudpod. If you have any feedback or suggestions for a future episode topic, send us an email to  allbooksaloudpod at gmail. com and read on, my friends.

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