Never Donate These Books to Small Free Libraries (or Anywhere Else)
If your personal library has long outgrown the bookshelves in your home, it’s probably time to cut back on your items. Donating old books to your local library, used store, or Little Free Library is a great way to donate to your new home, but some books are just not appropriate for giving away. As a donor, you need to know the difference.
The whole point of donating books is for someone else to read them. Like clothes, food, toys, and other donated goods, the used book you donate should really be welcome, not a pile of your rubbish for someone to sort out. Before donating a book, ask yourself two questions: can someone else physically read it? If so, would anyone want to?
Don’t donate books in a very rude way
Donated books don’t end up straight out of your bag and onto the shelf – someone has to look at them first. All books that are too damaged to read are thrown away, recycled, or sent for repairs, so there is no point in even donating them. If the book is dirty, moldy, stained, torn, sun bleached, water damaged, missing pages, covered in marginal notes, torn by the spine, or otherwise damaged to the point of being unreadable, do everyone a favor and recycle it yourself. You will save librarians, volunteers, and other readers a lot of problems.
Don’t donate heavily outdated books
Some books age better than others, and often physical condition has nothing to do with it. Old information is useless at best and dangerous at worst, so think twice before dumping outdated books. There are two main categories to watch out for.
Books with outdated information
Older reference materials are among the least valuable books you can donate; textbooks, technical guides, how-tos, and guidebooks from yesteryear simply won’t be very helpful to those who pick them up. Enthusiasts or collectors might be interested, but they must find the book first – which they can’t do if the library donation manager or Goodwill (right) refuses to shelve your 2000 survival guides or 2004 chemistry textbook.
A slightly more niche example of legacy books is ARC, or the extended reader’s copy. These are mainly early unofficial drafts of books that publishers send out prior to publication for review. Since ARCs are not the final version of the book, they may contain typos, grammatical errors, and other minor errors that the author and editor will correct before sending the manuscript to print. For this reason, libraries do not accept ARC donations, so if you are sitting on a pile of them, do not package them or ship them to your local library.
Fanatical or otherwise malicious content
Maybe it goes without saying, but if you want to get rid of the book precisely because it is racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, fat-phobic, or just plain nasty, perhaps don’t put it back into the word. This is especially important if you are planning to donate a small free library to your area; LFLs are often child and family oriented, and the fewer fanatics the kids absorb, the better.
What to do with books that cannot be gifted
So you’ve edited your donation stack to the most valuable and coveted titles, and now you have a second stack of books with nowhere to go. What to do? You still have a few options:
- Sell Them: Posting super niche and / or outdated books on resale sites like eBay or Craigslist is probably your best way to find a home for them. Just make sure they are in decent, readable condition.
- Swap them: ARC is especially difficult to donate, even in perfect condition, but your friends and family might find it interesting. If you have ARC of popular games, ask if anyone needs them. A few typos are better than waiting three months to get a library copy.
- Recycle or Throw Them Out: Sometimes a book is for a big recycling facility in the sky, and that’s okay. Check your local recycling regulations to make sure they accept books, and if not, contact your library for help.
After all, when you donate books, you have to think about who will actually want to read them. This is the best strategy for making sure your books go where they belong, be it the Little Free Library or the Waste Bin.