Most people picture a donated book going onto a library shelf. It almost never does. Libraries sell the majority of donated books through Friends groups to fund programs, drop boxes resell them online, and overseas programs ship them in containers. None of that is bad, but it changes which books are worth carrying where. This page sorts the destinations near you by what they do with a box of books, and by which books they will turn away.
The American Library Association is direct about it: a library that receives a donated book may keep it in the collection, put it in a book sale to raise funds, or discard it. In practice the sale is the usual outcome. Friends of the Library groups run those sales, and the revenue pays for programs the library budget does not cover. So your paperback is more likely to fund a children's story hour than to be catalogued.
That makes libraries a good destination for popular fiction and recent nonfiction in clean condition, and a poor one for anything obscure or dated, which will sit through three sales and then be pulped at the library's expense. Every system posts its own guidelines; the ALA advises checking the website first and phoning if there is nothing posted. Many libraries limit donations to a box or two per visit.
The green drop boxes outside libraries, campuses, and shopping centers belong to Better World Books, which sells donated books online and directs a share of net sales to literacy partners including Books For Africa and Room to Read. Books that cannot be sold are passed to nonprofit partners or recycled rather than landfilled. It is a commercial company with a literacy mission rather than a charity, so there is no tax receipt, but it is the easiest way to move a box of ordinary books without a conversation.
Boxes accept books in good condition. Each posts its own list of exclusions, and moldy, water-damaged, or torn books are turned away everywhere, because one damp book in a bin ruins the rest.
Books For Africa ships donated books in containers to schools and libraries across the continent, and it is unusually specific about what it wants, which makes it easy to pack for. It accepts children's books, books published within the last 15 years, primary through college textbooks from the last 15 years, dictionaries and reference books from the last 10 years, and medical, nursing, technical, and science books from the last 10 years.
It does not accept encyclopedia sets, magazines or academic journals, cookbooks, home decorating or wedding books, American history or civics, K through 12 music books, foreign-language books other than French, or books with words like "kill" or "murder" in the title. Drop-offs are taken at its warehouses in St. Paul, Minnesota and Marietta, Georgia. Mailed donations go to the Georgia warehouse only, in boxes under 50 pounds, at your expense.
Books to Prisoners programs in many cities send requested titles to incarcerated readers, and demand runs far ahead of supply for certain categories: dictionaries, GED and trade study guides, how-to and legal self-help, and popular paperback fiction. Almost every program is paperback only, because hardcovers are refused by most facilities, and none can use romance novels or anything with staples or spiral bindings. Check the program's current wish list before packing, since rules follow the prisons they serve.
The small boxes on posts in front yards and outside cafes work on one rule: take a book, leave a book. They are ideal for a handful of good paperbacks and useless for a carload. Restock a box with books someone walking past would actually pick up, which means recent fiction, children's picture books, and readable nonfiction. A box stuffed with a dead relative's reference set is a box nobody opens twice.
Goodwill and the Salvation Army take books and sell them by the piece or the pound; children's books and current bestsellers move, encyclopedias do not. Family shelters and after-school programs want children's and young-adult titles in near-new condition. Elementary schools take picture books for classroom libraries but usually only through a teacher you know. In each case the useful question is the same: would a child or a customer pick this up today?
Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]
A used book has three possible futures: read again, sold to fund something, or pulped. Which one it gets is decided almost entirely by where you drop it. A shelter or a prison program produces the first outcome for the narrow set of books they want. A library sale or a drop box produces the second for anything with resale value. Everything else, wherever it goes, ends up as paper. Matching the book to the destination is the only lever you have.
Encyclopedias, outdated textbooks, magazines, Reader's Digest condensed volumes, and most books printed before 1990 have no donation destination. They are paper. Curbside recycling takes paperbacks whole in most programs; hardcovers need the covers removed first. It feels wrong to recycle a book, but it is what a library would do after paying to store it, and it costs you nothing.