Where Can I Donate Textbooks in Boston?

Give My Books Network collects textbooks free from your door anywhere a Local Pick-Up Partner serves your ZIP code in Boston, in any quantity, including editions that are two or three cycles out of date.

Textbooks are the hardest books in the house to place. A library branch will not take them. A campus buyback will offer three dollars, or nothing, once an edition turns over. Meanwhile they are the heaviest thing on the shelf and the least likely to move on their own.

Does Give My Books Network Accept Old Editions?

Yes. Old editions are welcome, including the ones a bookstore has stopped buying. Give My Books Network accepts textbooks regardless of edition, subject, or how many semesters have passed since a professor assigned them.

An out-of-date edition is still a usable book for a tutoring program, an adult education class, a prison literacy program, or a reader who simply wants to learn organic chemistry without paying three hundred dollars for the privilege. Edition numbers matter to a syllabus. They matter far less to a curious person.

Pickup Near Boston University, Northeastern, and UMass Boston

Free pickup runs across the student neighborhoods of Boston, including the apartments and walk-ups around Boston University, Northeastern, UMass Boston, and Bunker Hill Community College. The service is the same one used by families and estates, at the same price, which is nothing.

The Charles River side of the city empties out twice a year, and every one of those apartments has a stack of textbooks nobody wants to carry to the car. A scheduled pickup takes the whole stack off the stoop and out of the story.

How Do Students Schedule a Free Textbook Pickup?

Enter the apartment's ZIP code on the Give My Books Network site, choose a service day, pack the textbooks into boxes, and set them out by 8 AM. A Local Pick-Up Partner collects between 8 AM and 8 PM.

1. Use small boxes. Textbooks are heavy and a large box quickly becomes unliftable.
2. Do not sort. Textbooks, novels, DVDs, and CDs can share a box.
3. Bring the boxes to ground level yourself. Partners collect from the stoop or entryway.
4. Set everything out by 8 AM, somewhere dry.
5. Go to class. You do not need to be home.

Roommates can combine into one pickup. Four people, four stacks, one service day.

End-of-Semester Textbook Donations in Boston

The end of a semester is when most textbook donations happen in Boston, and it is also when service days fill up fastest, so booking a few days early is worth the small effort.

Move-out week is a bad week to be improvising. The truck is double-parked, the lease is up at noon, and nobody has a driveway to stage anything in. Books that were going to be handled tomorrow end up on the sidewalk in the rain instead. A pickup booked in advance quietly prevents all of that.

What Happens to Donated Textbooks?

A Local Pick-Up Partner sorts collected textbooks offsite. Many are redistributed to schools, tutoring programs, ESL classes, adult education programs, and prison literacy programs that request titles through the Give ME Books program. Some are resold by the partner.

That resale is what funds the free pickup, and textbooks are a real part of it. The Book Donation Programs guide from the American Library Association is honest about how difficult textbooks are to place through traditional channels, which is exactly why a sorting-and-resale model can do something a donation bin cannot. Items that cannot be reused may eventually be recycled as a last resort.

Which Textbooks Are Not a Fit

Water-damaged, mold-affected, and page-shedding textbooks are the only real exclusions. A book that comes apart in someone's hands has no second life ahead of it, and no sorting step changes that.

Everything else is fair game. Highlighting is fine. Margin notes are fine. A cracked spine and a coffee ring on the cover are the marks of a book that got used, which is the whole point of a textbook.