Can anyone offer suggestions on what to do with old college text books? I’ve looked on a few buy-back websites and, of course, no one wants to buy them. Is there a textbook recycler?
I don’t feel right just throwing them in the garbage, especially since it’s my very expensive college education we’re talking about! Please let me know what you did in the comments below.
17 thoughts on “What to do with old college textbooks”
Thanks. I have the same problem. It feels too wasteful throw away a perfectly good book.
Outside of reference material, they are pretty much useless. With college instructors being enticed to use new editions every semester, 10+ year-old books are dinosaurs. This isn’t that the information within is useless, just that no one will buy them / use them for class.
If any of them are for Literature or English, I will take them off your hands.
Most are criminal justice, sociology, and physical therapy. I do have a few college writing…are you interested in those?
Although I mostly agree with Adam above (that the newest editions will be the hottest commodities) you might try listing them on Amazon. You never know when someone might need what you’ve got.
Freecycle.
Be like me and trade them for books you want at paperbackswap.com.
There are organizations that you can donate old texts to that then send them off to third-world counties that have struggling school/college systems.
I’m not sure of any of the websites, but some of the local colleges may know. When i attended a few years back, LSC had donation boxes in different places around the campus.
Better to donate to Goodwill or someplace similar, than to throw them away. Maybe someone who is considering a career in sociology would be willing to pay $.50 to see if they should pursue it further.
Freecycle or Craigslist (for free)…?
Or…if there’s any interesting diagrams, drawings, photographs, etc…someone might be interested in buying them for arts/crafts projects through Etsy.
You might still be able to get some money for them at campusbooks.com and if they have no cash value, Campus Books will tell you how/where to donate them. If you donate, you can take a tax write-off.
There was a project in ReadyMade magazine (sometime within the last year?) that made furniture out of old encyclopedias.
I posted a bag of writing textbooks on freecycle a few years ago and was amazed how many people wanted them. I love freecycle, although sometimes I worry that I’m contributing to somebody’s hoarding disorder.
Thanks to everyone for your comments/suggestions. I found one website — sellusedbooks.com — that actually offered a reasonable amount of money for some of the books. As for the rest of the stack of books, I’m going to look into freecycle, etsy, and campusbooks.com. Thanks again!
You could also try half.com I used to sell textbooks there.
You can try selling them using bigwords.com Since it is a textbook search engine it searches lots of sites to find someone looking to buy your particular books. And if you can’t find anyone looking to buy the titles you have then you can always donate them to the local library.