You know this is a late response (I was sleeping dammit) and i shouldn't even be making it, but this pisses me off extremely. This is entirely the WRONG way to think about ANTHING. Ever. You never waste a resource, you never waste something you paid money for. Especially things like books which are in this world, given at most a few print runs since no one fucking reads these days. There are not billions of these books i own, there's likely not even millions.
To be honest if you are never going to read a book again I don't see much wrong with just chucking it into the recycling bin. I mean that's literally what happens to the vast majority of books given to "resale" used book stores anyways, they just recycle them into paper. A handful do end up going back onto the shelves, but the vast majority by far just go straight to the recycling center.
In fact I think I could make a pretty good argument about how keeping a book around that you are never going to read actually
wastes resources. For one thing that's one less thermal mass of paper that costs to reheat/cool in my house when I've been gone for a few days and turned off the climate control to save power. It also takes up valuable space which, should I lose too much, costs me extra time to navigate through my house. Then there's the simple time costs in packing, unpacking, and recategorizing every single time I move, plus the cost of expensive fuel to move it from one location to another each time. And if you look on the "lack of good" side, that's one less thing that gets made out of recycled paper.
I mean I wouldn't just trash it, but that's more because there are better options (such as recycling) than any instinctual aversion to doing so. Words might have special meanings, but unless you are ever going to listen to them again there is no point in wasting energy to trap them, never to be read again.