Affordable Books

Find quality used books at community-friendly prices.

Community Book Sales

Regular sales events bringing affordable reading to your neighborhood.

Wide Selection

Books, textbooks, CDs, DVDs, and other media available.

Support Local Literacy

Proceeds from sales support literacy programs in your community.

Donate for Future Sales

Schedule a free pickup - your donated books fuel future community sales.

Eco-Friendly

Keep books out of landfills and in the hands of readers.

Quick answer: Give My Books Network is not a used book store in Boston. It is the free doorstep pickup that keeps used book shelves and community sales supplied. Local Pick-Up Partners collect donated books at no cost between 8 AM and 8 PM, sort them offsite, redistribute many, and resell the rest.

Is Give My Books Network a Used Book Store in Boston?

No. Give My Books Network is a book donation pickup service and a used book resale network, not a shop with a door on Massachusetts Avenue and a bell over it.

The distinction matters if you are trying to work out where your boxes should go. You cannot walk in and browse. What you can do is have a Local Pick-Up Partner, the locally owned family business that does the collecting, take your books off your stoop for free. Where those books surface afterward is a used book store, a church hall sale, a flea market table, or a classroom.

How Do Donated Books Reach Boston's Used Book Shelves?

Donated books reach Boston's used book shelves through Local Pick-Up Partners, who collect boxes from doorsteps, sort them offsite, and pass them into two streams: redistribution through the Give ME Books program, and resale.

Boston's independent-shop ecosystem runs on a steady supply of ordinary books. Not rarities. Ordinary books: paperback mysteries, cookbooks, a battered anthology, twelve years of somebody's book club. A shop with a sidewalk cart of dollar paperbacks needs that cart refilled every week, and a Back Bay brownstone clearing three shelves is where the refill comes from.

What Kinds of Books Are Worth Collecting?

Give My Books Network accepts books of every kind, hard or soft, old or new, no matter the topic, along with most physical media.

• Hardcovers, paperbacks, and mass-market paperbacks
• Children's books, picture books, and young adult titles
• Textbooks, academic titles, and encyclopedia sets
• Cookbooks, art books, atlases, and reference
• CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes, vinyl records, and audiobooks
• Board games, puzzles, and video games

What has no second life is anything mold-damaged, water-swollen, or missing pages. Books like that come apart in a reader's hands, and no shop will shelve them. The American Library Association's Book Donation Programs guide says as much in plainer language, and it is worth five minutes before you pack anything.

Where Can You Buy Used Books in Boston?

Used books surface across Boston in independent shops, library branch sales, church basements, school gyms, flea markets, sidewalk carts, and online listings run by Local Pick-Up Partners. Prices usually run from a dollar to a few dollars.

Walk from Beacon Hill toward Back Bay and you pass the whole chain without noticing: a granite stoop where a box was collected on Tuesday, and a shelf three blocks away where those same paperbacks are two dollars on Saturday. Nothing about that route is fixed, and no partner will promise a title stays in the neighborhood. Often enough, it does.

How Do You Send Books Into Boston's Used Book Ecosystem?

Pack the books yourself, schedule a free pickup with Give My Books Network, and set the boxes outside by 8 AM on your service day. A Local Pick-Up Partner collects between 8 AM and 8 PM, and you do not need to be home.

A Beacon Hill brownstone gives you a granite stoop and about four feet of sidewalk, and that is the whole staging area. No driveway. No garage. Permit-only parking that turns a Saturday drive across town into an hour of circling. Set the boxes at the top of the stoop, under the overhang if there is one, with a lid or a heavy bag over the cardboard.

Your partner does not bring boxes and does not carry items down from an apartment. Everything has to reach the ground floor before pickup day. Four small boxes down a narrow staircase beat one heavy one, and your back will agree.

What It Costs, and What You Do Not Get

Nothing, and no tax receipt. Give My Books Network charges no pickup fee, no per-box charge, and no minimum, but Give My Books Network and its Local Pick-Up Partners are family businesses rather than 501(c)(3) nonprofits, so no tax-deduction form is issued.

The other thing you do not get is a promise that every book is donated. Some are. Some are resold, and that resale pays for a free pickup that would otherwise have to charge you. Items that cannot be reused may eventually be recycled, as a last resort rather than a default.

Pickup Request Form

Enter your ZIP code to begin your pickup request