What To Do With Your Old Books

Our guide on options for donating, selling, or otherwise downsizing your book collection.

Are you facing the age-old conundrum of having too many books and not enough shelf space? Or perhaps you're helping a loved one clean out their home and downsize their book collection. Or maybe you’ve been inspired to do a deep clean and get rid of anything that doesn’t spark joy, including that pile of books you haven’t picked up in a few years and doubt you ever will again.


Book lovers tend to loathe the idea of throwing away their old books, especially if they’re eco-conscious. But the good news is that there are plenty of ways to clear out space on your bookshelves while ensuring that your books get a second life. Whether that means selling old books for extra cash or donating them to your community, there are options suitable for every unneeded book on your shelf, from the outdated college textbooks to the once-beloved chapter books currently gathering dust.


In this guide, we'll break down a variety of options on what to do with your old books. Keep reading to find out which strategies best fit your needs and collection.

Selling books on Pango

Selling Used Books

If you want to make some extra cash while getting rid of your old books, there are a few ways you can go about doing this. The first step is to decide whether your goal is to maximize your profit or make back a few bucks quickly and conveniently. Selling books directly to other readers online usually yields the most cash back, but for someone who is prioritizing convenience, selling books in bulk to a bookstore is going to be the better option. You can combine strategies as well. For instance, you may want to sell your more in-demand bestsellers through an app like PangoBooks and donate the others.

Below, you'll find a few ways in which you can sell books. Take a look at this page for a more in-depth guide to selling books online. You can also see this blog post for tips on assessing the value of your book collection.

Selling to Local Used Bookshops

Local used bookshops often have book buying services that allow you to sell your old books for cash or store credit. Usually, you can find information about an individual store's buying hours on their website. Bookstores tend to be pickier about what they’ll take. If your titles aren’t in demand, you may not be able to sell them all. Also, since a local bookstore would be buying your books to resell at a profit, they won’t offer very much per book. That said, if the books you are selling are popular titles and you want to get rid of them in one fell swoop, then a local bookstore can be a worthwhile option.

Selling Books Online

When it comes to selling books online, you have a variety of venues and tools that generally will yield more profit than selling to a bookstore. Some platforms are built around selling individual listings to people directly, while others will buy books wholesale, which is similar to a bookstore.

At PangoBooks, we’ve endeavored to create the easiest possible tool for you to sell books directly to other readers. With our barcode scanning feature that auto-populates a book’s information and our data-driven price range suggestions, listing individual books for sale can be done in a matter of seconds. 

Once a book sells, we will send you an automatic shipping label, so all you have to do is pack it up and mail it out. If you like to sell books after reading them or always want to clear up bookshelf space to make room for new books, using an app like Pango can help you establish yourself as a bookseller and make the process of selling and buying books unbelievably convenient.  

Take a look here for a quick overview of the Pango selling process.

Pango app for selling books.

Whether you opt to use Pango or a different platform, selling books individually will take longer than unloading them wholesale to a bookstore or through donation. Some books, like hot bestsellers, might sell immediately while more obscure or niche titles will take longer or may never sell at all. Keep in mind: you can always list books for sale and donate them later if they aren't moving. Or consider dividing up your collection into a for-sale pile and a donate pile.


How to Sell on Pango at a Glance

  1. Download our app for Android or iOS devices. 
  2. Tap the "sell" button to create a listing. Create as many listings as you’d like for free.
  3. Fill out your shop bio and profile picture.
  4. When a book sells, you'll be sent an automatic shipping label. Package the book in a box or bubble mailer, attach the label, and drop it off at a post office or USPS drop box.
  5. After your book has been delivered, you can use your earnings to buy more books or transfer to a bank or PayPal account. Pango will deduct a single 20% fee from your earnings that covers all support, insurance, and payment process.

Hosting a Yard Sale

Don’t want to donate or sell online? Host a yard sale. Like selling on Pango, with a yard sale, you can set your own prices, which offers more freedom for the amount of money you can earn. However, people shopping at yard sales are likely looking for cheap deals, so the lower you price your books, the better. Additionally, you'll only be reaching a limited audience, so you're likely to still have quite a few books on hand at the end of the day.

Donating Books: Where and How to Donate 

Donating books to your community is a fantastic way to give back and ensure that your books get a new life. There are a number of avenues through which you can donate books. Opportunities vary depending on your area, but the following ideas are always worth exploring. 

Free little library

Little Free Libraries

Donating books to little free libraries is a wonderful way to give back to your community. These small wooden sheds that house donated books are often placed in community-centered places like parks or shopping areas. Despite the name, you don’t need a library card to use a little free library, nor do you need to sign books out and return them. Instead, they operate on a take-a-book-or-leave-a-book system, and readers and donors are encouraged to use the libraries to serve them in whatever way seems fit. Little free libraries aim to promote literacy and make reading accessible to everyone, and donating your books to them helps keep that mission alive.

You can check the Little Free Library world map to find the ones in your area. If none exist, you can start your own! There are options to build your own little free library or buy one premade to set up in your neighborhood. 

Local Thrift Shops

Other avenues for donating books are thrift shops such as Goodwill or Salvation Army. You can contact local thrift and secondhand shops to learn about their dropoff policies or, if you have a large amount of donations, pickup services. Depending on where and how much you give away, some donations can even be counted as tax-deductible. This option is usually a convenient way to unload a high volume of books quickly, but most thrift stores will appreciate a heads up to check their current capacity before you bring a house worth of books. 

Local Schools and Public Libraries

You can also look into donating books to your local schools or libraries. Picture books, chapter books, middle grade books, graphic novels, and young adult books are typically a safe bet for schools, while libraries will often take books for all ages. You can contact local schools or teachers directly to see if they’re accepting donations for classroom libraries. Many schools and libraries also run book sales where they accept donations of books that get resold in order to raise funds for their institution. These can be wonderful events that help support reading in your community. If your library isn't currently doing a book drive, maybe it's something you can volunteer to lead! 

Here too, you should talk to the librarians before bringing books to donate. Most libraries have limited shelf space and might not be able to take all your books, especially if they already have sufficient copies of a given title. 

In addition to schools and libraries, many retirement communities also have libraries on the premises and may have donation needs as well. 

Donating to Incarcerated People

Certain prisons also accept book donations for incarcerated people. If you live in a state like New York, there are options like the New York Public Library’s donation program Books Through Bars. Other states, like Massachusetts, have the Prison Book Program. You can find more local ways to donate books to incarcerated people by searching your state or city with “donate books to prison”. Many prisons request dictionaries and how-to books, including books on drawing and art, as well as legal self-help books.

 There are also guidelines and restrictions for donating books to prisons. These can vary by location but often include:

  • No nudity, in graphic novels or in photographs in books
  • No books that are marked up with highlighters, underlined passages, etc.
  • Hardcovers are not always accepted


Every prison book donation service has its own set of rules and needs, so make sure you do your research before you send them your books.

Putting Books on Your Curb

You can also “curb” your books, especially if you live in a city. If you live somewhere like NYC, chances are you’ve seen books and other possessions placed outside of apartments in boxes with a sign that says: “Free! Take me!” If you have books that you think people would be interested in, placing them on the curb with a “free” sign can be a good way to get them into the hands of new readers and give them a second life. 

To get a good idea of all the options available to you for donating, you can check this USA book donation map for local donation options.

Photo

Host a Book Swap

A great way to pass on your old books and get new ones is hosting a book swap with other local readers or friends. Book swaps are a great way to go book shopping for free while also unloading books you no longer want off your shelves.

You can use your own personal social media or post in a local community group to find other people interested in participating in a book swap, and plan to meet during a time frame at a public meeting area like a park or café. You can make it an event with snacks and music, or just set up a sheet or table with books and have people browse at their leisure. It can be a great way to make local friends with shared interests and bond over books. Who knows? You might even form a book club.

Of course, if you’re just looking to lose books without gaining any new (to you) books, this might not be the best option. You can opt not to take any new ones home, but it might be difficult if one of your friends happens to bring something by your favorite author that you haven’t had a chance to dig into yet. But if you’re someone who likes to rotate your book collection frequently, this could be a great way to ensure that you can do so in an eco-friendly and pocket-friendly manner. You can even make it a standing monthly or seasonal event!

Similarly, there are also bookswap communities online that do this sort of thing remotely via social media. You can try searching on various social media platforms to see if you can any such book exchange groups that focus on the sorts of books you're interested in. 

Repurposing Books for Art Projects

If you have books that are in poor condition or not desirable enough to sell or donate, like an old user manual for an outdated computer program, there are other ways to recycle the materials without just throwing the books away. Needless to say, if a book might still be of value to another reader, we strongly encourage you to donate or otherwise share it before busting out the exacto knife. That said, there are definitely books that do not meet that standard or are simply damaged to a point of no longer being readable. 

Collaging/Scrapbooking

If you’re an artistic person or are looking for a new creative outlet, you can use old books for collaging or other multimedia art projects. The same way collaging asks you to cut excerpts from magazines, you can do with different books.

If you like bullet journaling or scrapbooking, you can use cuttings in place of stickers for labeling things like the month, or use clipped excerpts to communicate a mood or feeling instead of writing a quote out by hand. Passages selected to be cut and pasted in your scrapbooks and bullet journals don’t have to be specific; they can be purely aesthetic, especially if you’re going for a dark academia or historic, romantic vibe in your spread. You can make any book page look vintage by dying it in brewed tea to brown the edges and add texture to the pages. 

Christmas Ornaments

Another creative way to repurpose old books for art is by clipping out lines or words you like, and putting them into clear ornaments to create bookish Christmas ornaments. They make for adorable decorations and also personalized gifts! You can use fun scissors to cut pages in a pattern, or if you’re blessed with good coordination and nimble fingers, you can fold cuttings into shapes like stars or hearts. You can also use whole pages to create folded ornaments, like an accordion fold rosette or teardrop-shaped ornaments.


Use Old Pages to Create New Found Art Poems

Another cool way to repurpose old books is to turn them into a poetry project. Blackout poetry is a form of found art poetry that you create by taking a page from a book (or magazine or newspaper) and using a marker or tape to “black out” words and chunks of text, intentionally leaving only some words or phrases visible to create a poem out of what’s left.


If using a marker isn’t your thing, you can also clip words and phrases and rearrange them into a new poem, gluing them onto a new piece of paper or cardstock. 


If you’re a writer who needs a creative boost, using an old book to create some found poetry might be just the spark you need to think outside of the box and get new ideas flowing. 


You can also host a poetry night with friends, and trade pages and materials to create found poems with, then take turns reciting your favorites. If you create one that you really love, you can frame it and keep it as a memento, or gift it to someone who would love it. 

Recycling Books

If none of the above options pique your interest, you can simply recycle your old books. Generally speaking, most paperbacks can be recycled with paper and cardboard locally. Hardcover books can be trickier to recycle. Some may require you to separate the pages from the binding, especially if the covers are made from fabric or other textiles. Make sure to check with your local recycling program for specific rules on how to recycle books that are past the point of donation. While it may seem super counterintuitive and destructive to dispose of books this way, the fact of the matter is that many older books are simply not of any value monetarily or intellectually. For instance, libraries frequently dispose of books like old instructional manuals or other texts with obsolete information. Certainly destroying books should be a last resort, but it's not categorically a bad thing to do, especially if the materials can be recycled effectively.