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What to do with old DVD's and books.


BigFatCoward

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Basically i'm moving house and i have just worked out that i have books and DVD's that i probably spent close to £10 grand on, that are now pretty much worthless.  i'm never going to read, or watch them again (books because paper books make me want to kill myself now, and DVD's because with Sky, Amazon and Netflix what is the point?).

Is there any point in keeping them, transporting them and then have them cluttering up my new house, or should i just give them to a charity shop.  it will break my heart but right now it just feels like i'm keeping them because of what they cost, not because they have any utility.  

does anybody buy second hand DVDs and books anymore?  

I've been building this collection for 25 years, is it sacrilegious to discard this sort of thing? 

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17 minutes ago, KiDisaster said:

There are charities who take donations of books and DVDs for schools and prison libraries and that sort of thing. You can look into that. 

We just started a project at work to get books for detainees when they are in our cells, maybe that could be an idea. 

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I'm feeling this at the moment! I work in a DVD and record store and get 30 percent discount which was terrible for me !!!! I've stopped buying DVDs now, only very special occasions but from the age of 19 to 21 especially I bought hundreds of dvds!!!! and i have hundreds of books from when I would buy them as a kid and im just thinking...it all HAS to go...but i'll be heartbroken!! this is my STUFF :(

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i think your local public library will take books as long as they are in good condition, probably DVDs too, my mother gives all her old hard covers to the library.

As others said, you could also donate them to a local shelter.  Worst case, you can put them on craigslist if you are in the US to give them away.  In my area they also have drop boxes for books, but I have no idea what happens to them, LOL.

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Same. There's a couple of bookscases at my parents I will need to give away at some point, but just haven't braced to do it yet. Do it, you're lucky to have an obvious, necessary moment for it.

It doesn't have to be a 100% thing, I suppose - maybe give yourself a (small) number (50?) and keep a few books for nostalgia and decorative purposes? I honestly think that vanity of having books for the visual effect is part of what's keeping me hanging on to them. (You know, that intellectual cachet of a giant dusty pile of the infamously disintegrating 1990s Wheel of Time paperbacks...)

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Ugh, I've been trying to do the same thing. Just finished some remodeling and no longer wanted a big rack of DVD's standing in the corner of my living room. I started paring down a little at a time, getting rid of the ones I know I won't watch anytime soon. I took mine to the local Goodwill donation store/drop-off. Not sure if you have anything similar in London or not but that's been working for me so far. Man did I blow a lot of money on dvd's over the years :bang:

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I donated a ton of books and DVDs to Goodwill a few months ago. Charity donation is the way to go, it feels so nice to get rid of accumulated stuff sometimes. I still have a fair number of both, but I trimmed a lot.

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I started being ruthless with books about 10 years ago - anything I didn't love and want to read again/use for reference went into a pile for charity shops. Once I fill a bag I take them to a charity shop. 

So you can either take them to a shop a bag at a time or research places that might take them all at once, e.g. a hospital. 

As for the DVDs aren't there any you want to keep?

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21 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

does anybody buy second hand DVDs and books anymore?  

I've been building this collection for 25 years, is it sacrilegious to discard this sort of thing? 

Except for rare/collectable stuff, charity shops do rather dominate the UK market now.

Just box them all up and give them to Oxfam. They will accept them with thanks and hopefully do some good with them.

 

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My local town has two second hand bookshops run by charities (Oxfam and Cancer Research), both with thousands of books. They are staffed mostly by volunteers, but run very professionally. The last commercial second hand bookshop closed years ago.

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So no used record/cd/DVD stores in the UK?

I don't think there are many. There used to be some, but I think they may have gone the same way as most of the new CD/DVD stores. In Cambridge there's only a single store left where selling (mostly new) CDs and DVDs takes up the majority of the store (although some other shops still sell some). There's also a couple of shops specialising in vinyl records.

My local town has two second hand bookshops run by charities (Oxfam and Cancer Research), both with thousands of books. They are staffed mostly by volunteers, but run very professionally. The last commercial second hand bookshop closed years ago.

It's similar here, there's still a decent choice for new books but I think only a couple of second hand bookshops aside from the charity shops.

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