Thrift Week 2026, Day 5: How to Recycle Books

If there's one thing I really can't stand to throw out, it's a book. That's one reason why my bookshelves are so overstuffed, with some volumes stacked horizontally across the tops of others: to make room for them to fit properly, I'd have to get rid of something else. But there's a limit to how many books I can cram in this way, so eventually I have to bite the bullet and get rid of some.

If the books are still in readable condition, the best option is obviously to get them into the hands of someone else who can use them. Ways to do this include:

• Passing books on to people you know. This is my personal favorite if I happen to have a specific book I know a friend or family member will enjoy. The downside is that sometimes they give the book back after reading it, and then I have to find another new home for it.
• Selling them to a secondhand bookstore. I've only been able to do this a few times over the years, as secondhand bookstores never seem to last long in the places where I've lived. I never got much money for them—usually pennies on the dollar against the cover price—but even a dollar's worth of store credit is a nice bonus. It makes me feel better about bringing home a new book (or two or three) to fill up the space I've cleared on my bookshelf.
• Dropping them in a Little Free Library. Our small town has more than a dozen of these, so I can always manage to find space in one of them for any book I need to cull from my collection. And it adds a spice of interest to my future walks to pass by the same Little Free Library and see if it's still there. Of course, there again, the risk is that I end up bringing home more books than I got rid of. But at least they'll be books that are new to me instead of ones I've already read and don't plan to read again.
• Donating them to the library. Our local library holds a book sale once a year as a fundraiser. It spends a week collecting books from the locals, scoops up the best ones for its collection, and sells the rest at bargain prices—from 50 cents for small paperbacks and kids' books to $2 for most hardcovers. We often save up books we're done with in anticipation of this sale, but if it's only been a couple of months since the last one, we try to get rid of them some other way rather than hang onto them all year. Other libraries in our area don't wait for an annual sale; they sell donated books out of a mini-bookstore near the front of the building. Both these little bookstores and the annual sale are good sources of cheap reading material that will eventually become part of the book-overcrowding problem. (It's the ciiiiiircle of books...)
• Giving them to a prison library. I've never personally tried this, but I hear tell that prison libraries are always eager to add to their collections and may even take books other libraries won't accept, like old textbooks. The American Library Association has some info about organizations that can help you get your books into the hands of folks inside.

This is only a sampling of the possible places to donate books. The Local Book Donations site has a tool to search for organizations in your area that will take them. And of course, there are always the old standbys, Freecycle, Buy Nothing, and Trash Nothing.

 

All this is fine for usable books, but what about the ones that are completely falling apart? Well, in many  towns, including ours, the pages can go directly in the paper recycling bin as long as you remove the cover first. If you're not sure about it, you can check with your local waste/recycling/public works department. If your town doesn't accept them, you can always search trusty old Earth911 for paper recycling sites in your area.

 

However, a more entertaining option is to take those old pages and use them for craft projects. There are all kinds of things you can make with paper, including origami, paper mâché, beads, flowers, and decoupage. Heck, with enough pages and enough polyurethane, you could probably cover an entire floor the way we did in our downstairs room. For books that can no longer serve their true purpose as reading material, a second life as a bouquet of paper roses seems like a less tragic fate than the recycling bin.And if you're not of a crafty bent yourself, you can offer up the book pages to friends, or strangers on Freecycle, who are.