Library Book Discarding

Libraries are pulping old books en mass. Your donations might go to a sale. If they don’t sell they will be destroyed.

There's a library book shop where they flog the outgoing volumes. They either get sold in a month, or burned. Since I was the only one checking out that venerable tome, it's probably been burned.

Throwing away books is sad... Don't you have any public bookshelves (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_bookcase) nearby?

Most libraries probably don't stock many books like that. They'd just waste shelf space until they get discarded in the end.

Looking to discard a bunch of paper books a few years ago, I discovered that local libraries often do not particularly want donations of books, and if they do, they have particular requirements of what they might want. E.g., if they accept anything at all, they might accept a novel in good condition, but probably not a first edition of "Just Java".

Books can be shared, traded, or resold.

No one is saying you need to throw out books, only that certain people decided not to sell them.

Lend them to friends when they visit, give them to a charity shop - that way someone else will enjoy them too. Why would you need to get money for them?There's no need to throw a good book away, or leave it collecting dust on your shelves (which is close to the same thing). Most books nowadays won't last longer than a human lifetime due to the perfect binding and terrible paper, so you're not keeping them for posterity by hoarding them.

Why not donate them to a library?

Deposit-return system for books? (Though it has obvious drawbacks that might outweigh any positives.)