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 does not run a used book store in Miami. It runs the free doorstep pickup that supplies them. Local Pick-Up Partners collect donated books from Miami homes at no cost, sort them offsite, redistribute many, and resell a portion through the shops and community sales this city has always had.

Where Do Miami Used Book Stores Get Their Books?

Miami used book stores get their books from Miami households, almost entirely. Every full shelf in a Coconut Grove shop started in somebody's house.

That is easy to forget when you are standing in a narrow aisle running a finger along the spines. The shop did not manufacture those books. Somebody a few miles away decided their shelf was full, packed a box, and let them go.

Give My Books Network is the part that happens before the shop: the free doorstep pickup, the offsite sorting by a Local Pick-Up Partner, and the redistribution out into the places books are actually wanted.

Does Give My Books Network Have a Storefront?

No. Give My Books Network is a nationwide community book-sharing network rather than a shop, so there is no counter to walk up to, no register, and no browsing hours.

What the network runs is the supply line. Free pickup from your door in Miami. Sorting by hand, offsite. Redistribution to readers, schools, libraries, nonprofits and organizations that request books through the Give ME Books program.

Some of what partners collect is resold, and independent shops are one of the places it lands. The small ones downtown. The ones tucked behind a coffee counter in the Grove. The ones that survive on turnover and taste. They need a steady supply of good used books, and that supply is you.

What Does a Miami Used Book Shop Actually Want?

Miami used book shops mostly want readable books that turn over quickly, not rarities. People assume the opposite, and people are usually wrong.

• Recent fiction and children's chapter books, which move faster than anything else on the floor.
• Cookbooks, and art and architecture titles. Miami has an unusual amount of both.
• Spanish-language paperbacks, which sell here in a way they simply do not in most of the country.
• History, biography, and the sturdy middle of any ordinary collection.

What no shop can use is anything that took on water or went musty in a closed carport. That much is universal, and it is the only real filter you need to apply yourself.

Why Not Just Drive the Boxes Downtown Yourself?

Carrying four boxes into downtown Miami, finding parking, and hoping the buyer has shelf room today is a rough afternoon, and a shop can only take what fits.

A pickup takes the whole load in one pass. The shop-worthy books and the rest of it, together. You do not stand on the sidewalk while somebody sorts your late father's library into a yes pile and a no pile.

What Happens to the Books a Shop Cannot Use?

Books a shop declines still have somewhere to go: many items are redistributed to readers, schools, libraries, nonprofits, and organizations that request books through the Give ME Books program.

Textbooks a shop would turn away are exactly what a tutoring program asks for. Children's books that would sit on a Grove shelf for a season move instantly into an M-DCPS classroom.

Some items may be resold by the partner to help sustain the free pickup service. Items that cannot be reused may eventually be recycled as a last resort. The network is wide enough that a single box can serve three destinations.

How to Get Your Miami Boxes Into the Ecosystem

Pack books into boxes or sturdy bags, well packed and not too heavy, and set them out on the morning of your service day.

1. Bag the books first, then box them. Miami humidity works its way into bare cardboard on its own.
2. Keep the boxes up off a concrete slab. Concrete wicks moisture straight up through the bottom layer.
3. Set out in the morning, under a carport, porch or covered entry. Not the night before.
4. Living in a downtown tower? Ask the front desk whether the package room will hold boxes for a few hours.

You do the packing. Your Local Pick-Up Partner does not bring boxes and does not take books off your shelves on the service day. Pickups run from 8 AM to 8 PM, and you do not need to be home.

A Complement to Miami's Libraries and Shops

Free book pickup competes with nothing in Miami. It feeds the shops, and it catches the overflow the libraries cannot hold.

The Miami-Dade Public Library System cannot absorb every donation that arrives at its doors, and no independent shop has infinite shelf space. The Book Donation Programs guide published by the American Library Association lays out how carefully institutions have to manage what they accept, and why saying no is often the responsible answer.

A pickup catches what is left. Free, from your door, on a day you choose. Schedule, set out, done.

Pickup Request Form

Enter your ZIP code to begin your pickup request