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. It is the free doorstep pickup network that helps keep St. Louis used book stores, community sales, and flea market tables supplied. A Local Pick-Up Partner collects your donated books at no cost, sorts them offsite, redistributes many, and resells the rest.

Is Give My Books Network a Used Book Store in St. Louis?

Give My Books Network is not a used book store but a community book-sharing network that collects donated books free from doorsteps across St. Louis and passes them on to shops, sales, readers, and programs.

There is no counter to walk up to and no shelf to browse. What there is instead: a Local Pick-Up Partner, meaning the locally owned family business that comes to your address on a scheduled service day and collects what you have packed.

Where Do Used Book Store Shelves in St. Louis Get Filled?

Used book stores in St. Louis fill their shelves from estates, downsizing households, walk-in trade-ins, and collection networks like Give My Books Network, whose Local Pick-Up Partners resell part of what they collect.

The independent-shop ecosystem here is real and it is stubborn. Storefronts along Delmar Boulevard, the shops scattered through the Delmar Loop and the Central West End, the weekend tables at neighborhood sales. None of them conjure books out of nothing. Every shelf started in somebody's living room, and in this city, usually somebody's basement.

What Happens When a Used Book Store Cannot Take Your Books?

A used book store in St. Louis buys what it can sell in its own aisles, which means large, mixed, or dated collections are often politely declined at the counter.

• Encyclopedia sets and dated reference volumes.
• Textbooks from a discontinued edition.
• Book club editions and condensed reprints.
• Mass-market paperbacks in quantity.
• Anything that came up from a damp basement still smelling like one.
• Four boxes of assorted titles, on a Saturday, with no warning.

None of that is a shop being difficult. It is a shop with finite shelf space doing arithmetic.

How Free Doorstep Pickup Works in St. Louis

Give My Books Network sends a Local Pick-Up Partner to your address to collect donated books and media at no cost. You pack the boxes, set them out by 8 AM on your service day, and the partner collects between 8 AM and 8 PM.

You do not need to be home. The partner does not bring boxes, so the packing is yours to do in advance. The covered front porch is the set-out spot most St. Louis donors use, and the garage or parking pad off the alley is the backup when the porch is open to the weather.

What Give My Books Network Accepts That Shops Often Decline

Give My Books Network accepts books of every kind plus most physical media, with no requirement that a title be currently sellable in a storefront. Hardcovers, paperbacks, children's books, textbooks, encyclopedias, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, vinyl records, audiobooks, board games, puzzles, and video games all count.

Libraries run into the same wall from the other direction, which is why what the American Library Association says about donating books to libraries is worth two minutes of anyone's time before they load the car. Some items are resold by the partner. Many are redistributed through the Give ME Books program to schools, literacy programs, and community centers. Items with no second life left in them may eventually be recycled, as a last resort.

How Buyers Find Low-Cost Used Books in St. Louis

Buyers find the cheapest used books in St. Louis at community sales, church hall and school gym sales, flea markets, and the independent shops that buy from local collection networks.

Teachers building a classroom library. Homeschool parents chasing readers by level. People who go through four novels a month. They are the reason resale works, and they are why a donated box from a two-story brick flat does not sit still for long.

Pickup Request Form

Enter your ZIP code to begin your pickup request