My mother had an euphemism for the total collapse of civilization: "burning the books".
I see books as fuel before long.
I burned a large stack of books and several large boxes of old reports from the office during March. It works pretty well as long as you get the stove well heated before the paper, then put wood under rhe paper to elevate it and heat it all the way through. If you do it right the outcome is a very small pile of fine white ash. Do it wrong and you have a mess of black char and unburned paper.