Reading is at the heart of what we do and the books we buy need to work hard to keep up with demand. Last year we had almost one hundred and fifty thousand books available for people to borrow and on average each adult fiction book was borrowed six times. We aim to provide our customers with the books that they want to borrow and that means we buy books across the board from huge runaway bestsellers through literary fiction to romances and classic novels.
However, as you know, you can never have enough books, and in the spirit of sharing the joy of reading, we are asking you to help us in three ways.
Buy a book
We aim to offer as wide and diverse a selection of books as possible. This sometimes means that we don’t have as many copies of popular books as we would like. If you would like to buy a book to donate to us, you can take it to any library in York. You can find a list of our most requested books here and narrow down the list by including a format from the list on the left-hand side.
Give us your pre-loved books.
We welcome your pre-loved books as valuable additions to our stock, we love books in perfect condition to be donated to us, especially if they are in high demand by other customers. Sometimes we receive too many books as donations, and we will add them to our regular book sales to raise income for our libraries.
We are unable to accept books that are not in good condition and non-fiction books that are out of date. We do not accept any large quantities of unwanted books intended for disposal and will decline these items.
Donate a reading group set
We have more than 200 sets of books that are for the exclusive use of reading groups, both those that meet in libraries and those that meet in other venues. Our reading group sets come from a variety of sources, we buy some, some are donated to us by publishers and authors and some are donated to us by reading groups if the members have bought them. If your reading group has bought a set of books and wants to pass them on to another group, look no further. You can take them to any library in York and they will be added to our stock.