What do you do with them?

I feel embarrassingly conflicted on this issue. I really want to throw the jacket away whenever I acquire a new book: books almost always look better without them, and they always get in the way when I'm reading. I can remove them and store them somewhere, but I absolutely hate storing useless things. If I dispose of them, I run the risk of devaluing the books, and, of course, suddenly the bindings are exposed to harmful dust! I happen to buy a lot of old, secondhand books at community book sales and thrift shops, and, as I'm hardly a collector, I know nothing of their potential value, nor do I particularly care to do the requisite research to find out. I could be sitting on a small gold mine. Also, it just feels slightly wrong to mutilate a book: I won't write notes in them, and unless they're mass market paperbacks, I won't dog ear their pages.

I've thrown away dust jackets before, and it still hurts a little. Then I look at the books on my shelf that still have them, and I immediately get the itch to divest them!

Protect them.

http://www.shopbrodart.com/book-jacket-covers/

The NYPL has used these for decades.

Books that have some value are worth much more at resale with the dust jacket; if you don't care about that, but plan to keep the books, you should preserve the jackets, as they serve a useful purpose - not protection from dust (you can always dust them), but protection from light. Spines fade and become brittle if exposed to sunlight for a long time. I, too, consider them a nuisance when I'm reading, so I remove them, and put them back on when I'm done with the book.

^Ditto. They're a PITA when reading, but really preserve or establish the resale value of a book. Compare the same book, same edition with jacket and without. www.alibris.com or www.abebooks.com Startling difference.

Scott

I actually LIKE the dust jackets, so never feel conflicted about this.

Yes, I'm with Sartre (except when I'm reading them). Some of them, like old LP album covers, are kinda artistic, like the O'Brians we've discussed, or, for another example, I've got quite a few early edition Faulkners that are real period pieces; and the simple dignity and gravitas of scholarly OUP texts is matchless.

i read books sans dust jacket and after reading for the day the jacket is placed back on the book. of course kindle and Ipad do not have this problem except the devices themselves should also be protected with leather covers

I typically take them off until I'm done with the book, except for the real epics that take awhile (I've been part-time reading Fehrenbach's Lone Star for the better part of a year, for example).

Apparently Andy Rooney doesn't care for them either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 6U4IF39kqM#!

I don't really have to deal with them. The majority of my "reading" is done via Audible.com.

Trip English wrote:

Apparently Andy Rooney doesn't care for them either.

Amazing.


Thanks for the responses, everyone. I wish I could read everything on my Kindle, but used books can be so much cheaper than ebooks.