--- title: "Donate or Throw Away Old Books? A Minneapolis Guide" description: "Donate old books or send them to a landfill? A Minneapolis guide to mildew, water damage, and books people wrongly assume nobody wants. Free doorstep pickup." lang: en json-ld: | [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com/#organization", "name": "Give My Books Network", "legalName": "Book Sourcing Mastery, LLC", "url": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com", "logo": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com/social-card.jpg", "image": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com/social-card.jpg", "description": "Give My Books Network is a nationwide United States network of local Pick-Up Partners who collect used books, textbooks, CDs and DVDs for free directly from the donor's door, resell what is sellable and rehome the rest to schools, libraries, shelters and nonprofits.", "foundingDate": "2022", "telephone": "+1-855-506-8633", "email": "support@givemybooksnetwork.com", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "2091 Stratton Ct.", "addressLocality": "Ann Arbor", "addressRegion": "MI", "postalCode": "48108", "addressCountry": "US" }, "contactPoint": { "@type": "ContactPoint", "telephone": "+1-855-506-8633", "contactType": "customer service", "email": "support@givemybooksnetwork.com", "availableLanguage": "English" }, "sameAs": [ "https://www.facebook.com/givemybooksnetwork", "https://www.instagram.com/givemybooksnetwork", "https://twitter.com/givemybooks" ], "areaServed": { "@type": "Country", "name": "United States" } }, { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "Give My Books Network", "legalName": "Book Sourcing Mastery, LLC", "url": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com", "logo": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com/social-card.jpg", "image": "https://givemybooksnetwork.com/social-card.jpg", "description": "Give My Books Network provides free door-to-door book donation pickup services across the United States. 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A Minneapolis guide Donate old books or send them to a landfill? A Minneapolis guide to mildew, water damage, and books people wrongly assume nobody wants. Free doorstep pickup. Schedule Free Pickup ![A stylized city skyline at golden hour with books in the foreground](/assets/city-scene-fallback-yglTcFEu.jpg) Minneapolis, MN # Donate or Throw Away Old Books? A Minneapolis Guide **Quick answer:** Most old books in Minneapolis are worth passing forward, not sending to a landfill. Give My Books Network collects books of any age or topic free from your doorstep. Only mold, water damage, and missing pages truly end a book's life. Condition decides, not age, and not whether anyone still reads the subject. ## Should Minneapolis Homeowners Donate Old Books or Let Them Go? Donate, in almost every case, because Give My Books Network accepts hardcovers, paperbacks, textbooks, encyclopedias, children's books, and book club editions of any age, which leaves exactly one real question: is the book physically intact? Age is not damage. A 1962 encyclopedia set is not damaged; it is old. A paperback read four times is not damaged; it is loved. Mold is damage. Water is damage. Missing pages are damage. That is the whole test. ## Which Books Are Genuinely Beyond Saving? Only three conditions truly end a book: active mold, water swelling, and missing or unreadable pages. - **Mold and mildew** — a gray or black bloom on the page edges, and a smell that fills a room. No sorting fixes this. - **Water damage** — swollen boards, wavy pages, a spine that has let go. - **Missing pages or a broken block** — a book that comes apart in someone's hands has no second life waiting for it. Everything else is a candidate. Yellowed pages are fine. A cracked spine is fine. Highlighting in a textbook is fine, and students buy those anyway. ## How a Damp Powderhorn Basement Ruins a Box of Books Minneapolis summers are humid and older basements are damp, so a box of books stored downstairs through a wet August often comes up musty in September. This is the single most common way good books in this city stop being donatable. Concrete sweats. Cardboard wicks. A box in a Powderhorn basement sitting flat on the floor is drawing moisture up from below all summer long, and nobody notices until they open it. Keep books off the floor and off exterior walls. A pallet, a shelf, two bricks and a board. If they already smell, air them out for a week and check again before you decide anything. ## Which Books Look Worthless and Are Not? Textbooks, encyclopedia sets, and book club editions are the three categories Minneapolis donors most often assume nobody wants, and all three assumptions are wrong. Textbooks have a live secondhand market, even a few editions back. Encyclopedia sets are bought by teachers, set designers, and collage artists. Book club editions look cheap to a collector and read exactly the same to a reader who just wants the story. Give My Books Network takes all of them. Hard or soft, old or new, no matter the topic. ## What Give My Books Network Accepts in Minneapolis Give My Books Network accepts books of every kind plus most physical media: hardcovers, paperbacks, children's books, textbooks, encyclopedias, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes, vinyl records, audiobooks on disc, board games, puzzles, and video games. No sorting required. Hardcovers and paperbacks ride in the same box. Your Local Pick-Up Partner, the locally owned family business that collects, sorts everything offsite afterward. The [American Library Association's Book Donation Programs guide](https://libguides.ala.org/book-donations) explains why libraries have to decline so much of what is offered to them, which is precisely the gap a pickup network fills. ## How Do You Decide in Five Minutes? Open the box, smell it, and look at the page edges: if there is no mold and no water swelling, the books can be donated. 1. Smell the box. Musty and sharp means mildew, so set those aside. 2. Check the page edges for a gray or black bloom. 3. Press the boards. Swollen and wavy means water got in. 4. Fan the pages of a few. Missing sections and loose blocks are the end of the line. 5. Everything left goes in the donation box. All of it. ## What Happens to Donated Books in Minneapolis Local Pick-Up Partners sort every Minneapolis pickup offsite: many items are redistributed to schools, libraries, nonprofits, and literacy programs through the Give ME Books program, and some are resold. The resale is what funds the free pickup, meaning the vehicle, the fuel, and the sorting hours. Items that cannot be reused may eventually be recycled as a last resort. And because these are family businesses rather than 501(c)(3) nonprofits, no tax-deduction receipt is issued. ### Ready to schedule your free Minneapolis book pickup? We'll come to your door — no cost, no hassle. Book pickup, DVD pickup, large-quantity, estate, and more in Minneapolis, MN. Schedule Free Pickup Or browse all Minneapolis donation services including Textbook Donations , Doorstep Book Pickup , Estate Book Pickup . New to this? Our guide to [where to donate books](/where-to-donate-books) explains which books nobody can use any more, what happens to the rest, and how Minneapolis, MN pickups actually work. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Should I donate old books or send them to a landfill? ### Are moldy or mildewed books ever donatable? ### Do old textbooks and encyclopedias have any value? ### How do I stop books from getting musty in a Minneapolis basement? ### Will Give My Books Network take books a library turned down? ### Is there any cost to have old books collected? ## More from Minneapolis Learn More The best places to donate books in Minneapolis in 2026 Learn More Handling a large book collection in Minneapolis Learn More How to prepare books for donation in Minneapolis Service Textbook Donations in Minneapolis Service Doorstep Book Pickup in Minneapolis Service Estate Book Pickup in Minneapolis Back to Minneapolis Donation Services ## Find us in Minneapolis Our local Pick-Up Partners serve the Minneapolis area. If your exact address is inside our service area, you can book a doorstep pickup today. Loading map of Minneapolis, MN… ## Ready to clear your shelves? Join thousands of Minneapolis neighbors who have already donated their books through the Network. Schedule Free Pickup ![Give My Books Network Logo](/assets/gmbn-logo-BsMIhLrP.png) **America's Nationwide Community Book-Sharing Network.** Free book and media pickup service! Local Pick-Up Partners collect your donated books, CDs, DVDs, and media right from your doorstep. They resell to support their families and can donate through our Give ME Books program. #### Quick Links About UsWhere to Donate BooksGive ME BooksFor LibrariesPick-Up RequestBecome Pick-Up PartnerBecome an AffiliateFAQsContact Us #### Follow [](https://facebook.com/givemybooksnetwork)[](https://x.com/givemybooksnet)[](https://instagram.com/givemybooksnetwork) Privacy| Acceptable Use Policy| Disclaimer| Terms of Use| SMS Policy| [EntityMap](/entitymap.html "Structured entity index of this site for AI systems") © 2026 Give My Books Network, All rights reserved