Bay Area Residents Donate Books To Charities But Not Libraries

San Jose Mercury News:

A big, blue "Books for Charity" bin in the corner of a Safeway parking lot on El Camino Real in Menlo Park overflowed with donations Monday, prompting people to leave books in boxes on the pavement around it.

Read the whole story: San Jose Mercury News

Comments

[lhanderson86]

01:00 AM on 06/16/2011

There are better ways to help libraries. Monetary donations are appreciated. Some libraries have wish lists of books you can buy for the library. Please help libraries! Maybe you have a computer at home and enough money to buy books and don't need to use the library, but there are a lot of people out there who don't and need libraries, especially in an economic depression.

[thebigbike]

02:47 PM on 06/15/2011

A great many libraries do nothing with virtually all donated books except sell them on a rack in the front of the library. Even when they are books the library lacks and which have literary or scholarly value, or public demand as for once read best-sellers , acquisitions librarians often automatically reject current books if they were not selected and purchased by the library. If that's all they're going to do, I might as well pick a charity to give them to of more personal interest. I do think the for profit aggregators are something I wouldn't support, however.

[lhanderson86]

12:59 AM on 06/16/2011

A lot of donated books are in terrible shape. They simply can't go through them all to find the good ones and cross-reference them in the system to see if the need it for their shelves.