In an ideal world, there would be no books. I don't mean "no literature", I mean none of the physical objects. Unfortunately, they do exist, and in numbers. So what should you do if you have these crimes against nature in your home?
Store Your Handguns: There's nothing cooler than opening a book and seeing a gun inside its hollowed out pages. Recently, a book with a gun inside was donated to a Goodwill in Maine. It made the national news. How many copies of Regis Philbin's second autobiography Who Wants to Be Me? have been donated to Goodwill locations around the country? Thousands. How many of those have made the news? None. Point proven.
Store a Flask: The only thing possibly cooler than a gun in a book is booze. Hollow out various books for various liquors. Hollow out a Dostoyevsky for some vodka. A Tennessee Williams with Jack Daniels. A copy of the bible with some red wine. You don't need to buy a liquor cabinet. Just take that obsolete book shelf and put it to good use.
Kindling: Who chops firewood anymore? The Amish? There will come a time when you need to start a fire. Newspapers are a dead medium and are nowhere to be found. Just take rip out all 652 pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. You now have 652 pieces of kindling. Lucky you. Destroy the pages as Snape destroyed Dumbledore. (No spoiler alert necessary. You've had 10 years to read it. Ass.)
To Create a Bulletproof Vest: As we learned from Season 6 of the Simpsons, Bibles can stop bullets. Not everyone can be Ned Flanders, but apparently books can save everybody. Watch this man shoot Bill O'Reilly's book with a .36 and a .45 at point blank range. As you can see, it clearly blocks the .36. Go two hardcovers of Killing Lincoln deep around your most valued organs and you've got quite the conservative shield.
Sell Them: I know what you're thinking. "I can only get like $0.02 per book!" You're not wrong, but your thinking is. Sure, $0.02 doesn't seem to be much at the moment, but 20 years from now, you'll be paying someone to take them away from your house. Sell them while they still have value. While olds still embrace nostalgia. Before the rest of mankind wakes up and realizes their pointless obsession with pulpified wood. Get ahead of the curve while you still can.
So there you have it. As long as paper books are the primary form of publishing literature, they will still exist. You now have some ideas for alternative uses for this antiquated medium. Use them, before the government charges you a fee to be rid of them.
-Marc