Do you recycle your books once you have read and finished with them? I tend to keep most of my non-fiction books but I take all the fiction to a used/ second hand bookstore. I exchange them for new books (new to me). It’s also a really great way to find older books by an author you have just discovered. I’m often lucky and can pick up all the old books for half or less of what I would have paid in the bookstore, if I could find them all in a new bookstore. Stores selling new books can’t commit a lot of shelf space to the older books which won’t sell as well as whatever is the latest.

I also like recycling the books cause there are a lot of trees in those pages. It’s great if I’m not the only one to use that book. I wonder how many readers a book gets sometimes. I tried Book Crossing but no one has ever reported a book I shipped out with the BookCrossing information on it. I have pretty much given up on it. Besides, the second hand stores didn’t really care for the books I had written the BookCrossing tag into.

What do you do with books once you’ve read them? My Mother likes to read them, sleep with them, bathe with them. In the end the books are really dog earred. I’ve rescued a few before she throws them away but she likes to be the last one to read each book. Even though she knows it’s not the best choice as far as the environment and that she could get new books by exchanging them, she just likes to do it her way. I didn’t try too hard to reform her, what can you really do with your Mother?

[tags]books, recycle, reuse, secondhand, used, reading, novel[/tags]