Where Can You Donate Textbooks in St. Louis?

Give My Books Network collects textbooks free from your doorstep anywhere a Local Pick-Up Partner serves your ZIP code. A Local Pick-Up Partner is the locally owned family business that handles collections in your part of St. Louis.

Campus buyback windows close. Library branches decline textbooks almost as a rule. Thrift counters cap what they take. A doorstep pickup is usually the only route that fits a stack of eleven-pound editions.

Does Give My Books Network Take Old Editions?

Yes, including editions the buyback desk laughed at. A 2015 organic chemistry text with no resale value on campus still teaches organic chemistry, and someone tutoring a student for free would be glad to have it.

• Introductory and upper-level college texts, any subject
• Superseded editions and international editions
• Lab manuals, workbooks, and study guides
• High school textbooks and reference sets
• Professional and certification prep titles

Move-Out Week Near Delmar Boulevard: How to Plan It

Book your service day a week before move-out, not the morning of. End-of-semester week around Washington University, SLU, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and St. Louis Community College is chaos, and everyone waits until the last day.

1. Pack textbooks into small boxes. They are heavy, and a full moving box of them is not liftable.
2. Do not sort. Novels, notebooks with covers, CDs, and DVDs can share the box.
3. Set boxes on the apartment steps or the covered porch by 8 AM.
4. Cover the cardboard if rain is forecast, because a May storm off Delmar Boulevard ruins a box fast.

How Does Textbook Pickup Work in St. Louis?

Enter your ZIP code, choose a service day, pack your boxes, and set them out by 8 AM. A Local Pick-Up Partner collects between 8 AM and 8 PM. You do not need to be home.

The partner does not bring boxes and does not carry loads down from a third-floor walk-up, so the books need to reach the door before the service day. That is the one piece of work that stays with you.

Who Receives Donated Textbooks in St. Louis?

Many textbooks are redistributed through the Give ME Books program to tutoring programs, ESL classrooms, prison literacy programs, and nonprofits that request them. Some are resold by the Local Pick-Up Partner, and that resale is what makes the pickup free.

Not every textbook is donated, and nobody will pretend otherwise. Titles that cannot find a reader may eventually be recycled, as a last resort. The American Library Association's notes on donating textbooks explain why dated editions are hard to place, which is exactly why a network with resale in the model can take them when a library cannot.

What Textbooks Cannot Be Accepted

Water-swollen, mold-damaged, or missing-page textbooks cannot be accepted, no matter how recent the edition. Damaged paper has no second life waiting for it.

Highlighting and margin notes are fine. Nobody is grading you. A used textbook that shows it was actually used is still a textbook, and the tutoring program that asked for it will not mind your notes on the Krebs cycle.