If you go down to the Mid-Continent library administrative offices on 24 hwy in Independence you can donate them to the library and they will give you a receipt to use as a charitable donation on your taxes.
Pretty much any library will accept donations. Most are simply landfilled, but some are sold at annual book sales or on carts in the library. It
costs
too much for the library to process a donated book to make it worth taking them into the collection; purchased books come with a lot of the necessary pre-processing already done.
Hopefully they do recycle them. To answer the initial question, it is possible to recycle the paper in these books. I believe they can take such material at the city drop off points: http://www.kcmo.org/pubworks.nsf/web/recycledropoff?opendocument
There's one at Metro North Mall that I use that I'm all but certain could take it.
Hope this helps, Sean Crago/MrZaius