This is a common question and a good question. Our first priority is to make a book donation pickup convenient. That said, there are certain types of books and media we don’t take. Further below is a more detailed description.
Books we don’t take for donation
- Coffee table and large folio photography and art books
- Children’s and kids books
- Moldy and water damaged books
- Encyclopedias
- Legal books such as West Law
- Bound journals
- Cookbooks
- Corporate training books without an ISBN or just in binders
Generally if a few of these types of books are mixed in, such as cookbooks it’s not a huge issue, IF most of the books are in the range of what we do take.
Mainly we are trying to avoid pickups which are only these types of prohibited books. Besides cook books and kids and children’s books, the rest of our prohibited books only have value to the first user ie you. If someone visits Yellowstone they want to buy the coffee table book there!
Children’s books and cookbooks do have cool outlets such as thrift stores and charities that actively seek these books such as Open Books and Arc Thrift.
The reason is, we measure environmental foot-print by both how many books we can re-use and also the carbon footprint in moving them around and storing them.
For example, with bound journals, which university libraries are shedding by the millions, it makes no sense to keep driving them around and storing them when they just need to be recycled. Searchable computer databases made those obsolete.
For kid’s and children’s books, these are generally in demand nearby. Thrift stores and libraries who have regular book sales will sell through books very quickly to young families.
In Chicago, there is even an organization called Bernie’s Book Bank that is dedicated to gathering children’s books. For Book Driver, our niche is academic, textbooks, how-to books and other types of non-fiction books.
Finally, we do offer paid moving and recycling services for hard-to-place- reuse books, that don’t fit within the parameters of our free pickup service So drop us a line for a free quote.
And we understand that most of our customers want to donate their books but maybe don’t have time to parse the collection, so we won’t hold against you if there are some items which get mixed in on this list.
–Matt
>>>Schedule a book pickup in Chicago or elsewhere today!