Textbooks are the hardest books to give away, because the people who need them need current editions and the people who have them are usually holding old ones. Libraries will not sell them, thrift stores cannot move them, and most drop boxes list them as an exclusion. A few programs are built for exactly this, and each has an age rule. This page gives you the rules so you can sort the stack once and stop carrying it around.
Books For Africa is the most useful destination for textbooks because it says precisely what it wants. It accepts primary, secondary, and college textbooks, soft or hard cover, published in the last 15 years. Dictionaries and reference books must be from the last 10 years, and encyclopedia sets are excluded entirely. Medical, nursing, technical, and science books must be from the last 10 years.
It also excludes academic journals, K through 12 music books, American history and civics, and foreign-language books other than French. Drop off at the St. Paul, Minnesota or Marietta, Georgia warehouse, or mail boxes under 50 pounds to the Georgia warehouse only, at your own cost. The books go into containers bound for schools and libraries across Africa.
Bridge to Asia collects used and new academic and scholarly books, journals, and databases in health and medicine and across the arts and sciences, for universities in Asia. It is the right destination for the upper end of the stack: graduate-level texts, monographs, and professional references that no general program wants. Check its current guidance on subjects and shipping before you pack, since academic programs adjust their needs by field.
Medical texts have the shortest useful life and the strictest rules. The general guidance from international book programs is that clinical texts and journals should be no more than about eight years old or more than one edition behind, and Books For Africa draws the line at ten years. A pharmacology text from 2012 is not a donation, however good it was; it is a liability for the clinic that receives it. Nursing schools and medical student associations sometimes run their own collection drives with the same limits.
Drop boxes take some textbooks and resell them online, with a share of sales going to literacy partners, but each box posts exclusions and older editions are routinely declined because they do not sell. Before donating a current-edition textbook at all, check a buyback aggregator: a text still in use can be worth real money to a student, and the cash buys more books for a program than the donated copy would. Donate what the buyback sites price at zero.
GED programs, adult literacy centers, community college tutoring labs, and homeschool groups can use current-edition math, science, and language texts, and they rarely have budgets for them. Prison education programs want GED and trade study guides above almost everything else, paperback only. This is the one destination where a phone call matters more than a rule, because a single tutor who needs the exact book you have is worth more than a container shipment.
A textbook older than the age limits above has no donation destination, and shipping it anywhere costs someone money to dispose of it at the other end. Recycle it. Paperbacks go into curbside paper recycling whole in most programs; hardcovers need the covers cut off first. It is the same thing a library would do, and it frees the shelf for something someone wants.
Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]
A textbook is a snapshot of a field, and the programs that ship them abroad are supplying classrooms that will use the book for years after it arrives. A 15-year-old algebra text is still algebra. A 15-year-old biology or nursing text teaches things that have since been revised, and a school with one copy per subject has no way to know which pages are wrong. The age rules are not fussiness. They are how a program avoids shipping errors at container scale.
Everything else on the shelf has an easier path, and our guide to where to donate books near me covers libraries, drop boxes, prisons, and shelters for ordinary books. Keep textbooks separate when you sort; mixing them into a general donation box is the fastest way to get the whole box refused.
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