Almost everyone takes books, which is exactly why donating them well takes a little thought. Libraries want current titles for fundraising sales, prison book programs want specific genres and paperbacks, shelters want kids' books, and nobody anywhere wants your encyclopedias. Here is where each kind of book does the most good.
Most public libraries accept donations for their Friends of the Library book sales, which fund library programs. What they want: relatively current titles in clean condition. What overwhelms them: huge mixed boxes, old textbooks, and anything musty. Call ahead if you have more than a few boxes; many branches have limited sorting capacity and specific drop-off days.
Prison book programs send free books to incarcerated readers, and demand far exceeds supply. Paperbacks are usually required (hardcovers are banned by many facilities), and the most requested genres are dictionaries, GED and trade study guides, westerns, sci-fi, and how-to titles. The Prison Book Program maintains a master list of programs by state, so you can mail books to the group serving your region. This is the most underserved destination on this list.
For a steady trickle rather than a purge, the small book boxes in neighborhoods take a handful at a time and put books directly into neighbors' hands. Kids' books circulate fastest. It costs nothing and requires no phone call, just restock a box when you pass one.
Family shelters and after-school programs want children's and young-adult books in good condition, and some Boys & Girls Clubs run literacy programs that accept donations. Adult shelters take current paperbacks. Direct-service donations like these skip the resale step entirely: your book goes straight to a reader.
Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and Habitat ReStores sell donated books cheaply and in volume, and they will absorb the big mixed boxes other places cannot. Books that do not sell locally are often bulk-sold or recycled rather than trashed. For a whole-shelf cleanout, thrift is the practical backbone, with the better titles pulled out first for the destinations above.
Last updated June 2026. Errors: [email protected]
The highest-value sort takes ten minutes: current fiction and nonfiction to the library sale; paperbacks in the wanted genres to a prison book program; children's books to a shelter or Little Free Library; the remaining bulk to thrift. This ordering matters because each destination has a different bottleneck: libraries lack sorters, prison programs lack inventory, shelters lack kids' titles, and thrift lacks nothing except shelf space. One cleanout can feed all four.
Incarcerated readers have almost no other source of books: prison libraries are thin or nonexistent, and families often cannot ship books because facilities require deliveries from approved vendors or programs. Volunteer books-to-prisoners groups fill that gap by mail, and they are chronically short of dictionaries, GED guides, and popular fiction. Facility rules are strict, paperbacks only, no spiral bindings, sometimes no hardcover at all, which is why your mass-market paperbacks are precisely the needed format.
For hundreds of books at once, skip the library (they cannot sort it) and go to thrift, which absorbs volume, or call a local used bookstore for a bulk offer on the better titles and donate the proceeds. Some areas have book-drive nonprofits with bins or even free pickup services. Keep estate sets with potential value, first editions, signed copies, complete series, out of the donation boxes until someone knowledgeable looks; a single valuable book can be worth more than the entire rest of the load.
Books that no one will read again still should not go in the trash whole. Paperbacks recycle as-is in most curbside programs. Hardcovers need the cover boards removed first, since the binding glue and boards contaminate paper recycling; tear out the block of pages and recycle that. Moldy or wet books, unfortunately, are trash, and they will contaminate a donation box, so never mix them into a giveaway load.