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 Tampa. It runs the free doorstep pickup that keeps Tampa's shelves supplied. Local Pick-Up Partners collect donated books from homes at no cost, sort them offsite, pass many along, and resell a share through the shops and community sales this city already has.

Does Give My Books Network Have a Used Book Store in Tampa?

Give My Books Network does not operate a used book store in Tampa. It is a community book-sharing network rather than a shop, so there is no counter to walk up to, no register, and no browsing hours.

What it runs is the supply line. Free collection from your door. Sorting by hand, offsite, by a Local Pick-Up Partner. Redistribution out to readers, schools, libraries, nonprofits and the organizations that request books through the Give ME Books program.

A portion of what partners collect is resold, and the independent shops are one of the places it lands. The small rooms with a bell on the door. The ones that live on turnover and taste. They need a steady supply of good used books, and that supply is you.

Where Does a Tampa Used Book Shop Get Its Books?

From Tampa houses, very nearly all of it. Every shelf in a Hyde Park shop began as somebody's bookcase two or three miles away.

Stand in a narrow aisle off Swann Avenue with a finger running down the spines and that is easy to forget. Nobody printed those books for that shop. A family looked at a full bookcase, made a decision, and packed a box.

Give My Books Network is the part that happens before the shop: the free pickup, the sorting, and the routing out to wherever the books are actually wanted.

Why Won't a Shop Take My Whole Collection?

A Tampa shop cannot take a whole collection because shelf space is finite, and a shop that buys books it cannot sell has traded one problem for a much worse one.

Do the arithmetic the shopkeeper is doing. A small South Tampa shop might move a few hundred books in a good week. Buy two thousand on a Tuesday and the back room is full until Christmas, with rent still due every month in between.

That is not a criticism of anybody. It is the constraint every independent shop in this town works under, and it is running silently behind their eyes while they look into your box.

What Do Tampa Used Book Shops Actually Want?

Readable books that turn over quickly, not rarities. People assume the reverse, and people are usually wrong about it.

• Recent fiction and children's chapter books. Nothing on the floor moves faster.
• Florida writing: state history, hurricanes, birds, the Gulf, novels set somewhere you recognize. It sells here and almost nowhere else.
• Cookbooks, art, design and photography, which hold their price better than fiction ever does.
• The sturdy middle of an ordinary collection: history, biography, essays, the good paperbacks.

What no shop can use is anything that went musty in a shut garage. That is the one filter genuinely worth applying yourself before you pack.

What Happens to the Books a Shop Turns Down?

Books a shop declines still have somewhere to go, because the network is far wider than the retail floor.

Textbooks a shop would not touch are exactly what a tutoring program asks for. Children's books that would sit on a Hyde Park shelf for a whole season move into a classroom in a week. Large-print editions that no buyer wants are requested constantly by senior centers.

Much of what partners collect is passed along to readers, schools, libraries, nonprofits and organizations requesting books through the Give ME Books program. Some is resold to sustain the free pickup. Anything that cannot be reused may, as a last resort, be recycled. One box regularly serves three destinations.

How Do You Get Tampa Boxes Into That System?

Pack them and schedule a free pickup with Give My Books Network. Five steps, none of them difficult.

1. Bag before you box. Tampa humidity gets into bare cardboard without any help from the rain.
2. Keep every box light enough to carry from the door to the carport in one trip.
3. Raise the boxes off the concrete slab. A plank, a pallet, a folded towel. Two inches of air will do it.
4. Set them out on the morning of your service day, under the carport or a covered porch.
5. Note the access details when you book: the side gate, the screened lanai, the driveway behind the house.

You pack. A Local Pick-Up Partner does not bring boxes and does not take books off your shelves on the day. Collection runs from 8 AM to 8 PM, and you do not need to be home.

A Complement to Tampa's Libraries and Shops

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

The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library cannot absorb every donation that arrives at its branch doors, and no independent shop has infinite shelves. The Book Donation Programs guide published by the American Library Association explains how carefully institutions have to manage what they accept, and why a no is often the responsible answer.

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

Pickup Request Form

Enter your ZIP code to begin your pickup request