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 in Washington, DC. It is the free doorstep pickup network that helps keep secondhand shelves supplied. Local Pick-Up Partners collect donated books at no cost, redistribute many through the Give ME Books program, and resell the rest through shops, community sales, and online channels.

Is Give My Books Network a Used Book Store in Washington, DC?

Give My Books Network is not a used book store in Washington, DC. It is the free pickup network that supplies them, and that distinction matters if you are trying to figure out where a shelf of books should go.

There is no storefront with a bell over the door on Connecticut Avenue. What there is instead is a nationwide community book-sharing network of locally owned family businesses called Local Pick-Up Partners, who collect donated books from doorsteps and route them onward.

How Do Donated Books Reach a Used Book Store in Washington, DC?

Books collected by a Local Pick-Up Partner are sorted offsite, and titles with resale value move into secondhand channels: independent shops, community sale tables, flea markets, and online listings.

The rest of the sorting goes the other direction. Many books are redistributed through the Give ME Books program to schools, libraries, literacy programs, senior centers, and nonprofits that have asked for titles. One donation frequently splits down both paths.

What Kinds of Books Move Through Washington, DC's Used-Book Shelves

Secondhand shelves in Washington, DC run heavy on politics, history, policy, law, and biography, because that is what this city reads and what this city passes on.

• Politics, policy, and history — the deepest category in town, and the one that turns over fastest.
• Biography and memoir — a steady seller in a city of people who worked for someone famous.
• Literary fiction and popular paperbacks — the backbone of any used section.
• Children's picture books and readers — snapped up quickly and rarely on a shelf long.
• Textbooks, art books, and reference sets — often worth more than the donor assumed.

The independent-shop ecosystem around Dupont Circle and Georgetown depends on a steady supply of exactly this. Nine times out of ten, that supply started as somebody's donation.

How to Send Your Books Into Washington, DC's Used-Book Supply

Schedule a free pickup with Give My Books Network, pack the books yourself, and set the boxes out by 8 AM on your service day. A Local Pick-Up Partner collects them between 8 AM and 8 PM, and you do not need to be home.

1. Enter your ZIP code to see whether a Local Pick-Up Partner already serves your block.
2. Pack into sturdy boxes, totes, or doubled bags. Partners do not bring containers.
3. Keep each box light enough for one person to carry alone.
4. Set everything on the stoop, in the vestibule, or on the alley pad by 8 AM.
5. Cover the cardboard if rain or snow is in the forecast.

What Give My Books Network Accepts

Give My Books Network accepts hardcovers, paperbacks, children's books, textbooks, encyclopedias, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes, vinyl records, audiobooks on disc, board games, puzzles, and video games. Hard or soft, old or new, no matter the topic.

Mold, water swelling, and missing pages are the exceptions, and they are real ones. Libraries have to decline far more than people expect, for reasons the American Library Association's guide to book donation programs lays out clearly. A pickup network catches a great deal of what a branch cannot.

Why Used-Book Resale Helps Washington, DC Readers

Every book that moves from a private shelf into a secondhand channel is a book somebody else can afford. That is the quiet arithmetic underneath all of this.

Washington, DC is a city of renters and movers. People arrive for a job, leave when the job ends, and the bookshelves turn over with them. A donation on a Tuesday becomes a two-dollar paperback for a graduate student in October. Everybody wins.

Pickup Request Form

Enter your ZIP code to begin your pickup request