It’s important to differentiate between being a free book donation pickup service and a free moving service. We don’t currently box or move books for free. There are costs both direct and indirect from moving books including,
- the chance of breaking objects in the house
- it’s hard on our staff
- we don’t have much warehouse space to store used book donations that are huge.
This all sounds like conventional wisdom and it is but I’ve wanted to express a bit more clearly. Most books indeed have no resale value. And we’ve found that larger donations while more costly to move and sort, actually have fewer books of value then smaller donations.
Why is that?
Well, the main reason is that larger collections are typically older. More older books equal less value. From a sustainability perspective we’ve come to see that shuttling around worthless books that will never sell is not what our supporters have in mind for sustainability. Recycling books is an important and essential method of freeing up space for bookstores, thrift stores and libraries.
The truth is, Book Driver plays an important role is helping make the hard decisions about what to do with books and what we’ve learned is that there is no magical place where books that are no longer in demand, can be sent and read.
This includes Africa, the local Goodwill, the local library. What these organizations and places want are books that people still read. No one can create readers for a title where no readership exists. I wish there was, but it ain’t happening.
Charging to box and move books
If you happen to see this portion of our book donation update and have a lot of books, know that as of know our book donation service offers a free pickup of up to 20 boxes. We sometimes can take more depending on the age of the books, the amount of space currently in our storage and whether a Book Driver team member is available.
Several book donations services throughout the country offer a paid service, that costs around $25 per thousand books and includes boxing and moving. I’ve thought about charging for clean-outs, of which we’ve done a couple, but I didn’t want to limit our impact in the Denver neighborhood we have promised to serve.
Also we’ve really designed this for people who have just a few boxes of books, less than 20, who just want to find a good home for books, want something a little more timely than our competitors, and is easy. If your in a situation where you have to move a ton of books, that are old and have no barcodes, for example, my advice is to recycle them because more than likely, that’s what needs to happen.
Thanks,
Matt