Last updated November 22, 2019. Confirmed by the board as still being current policy January 28, 2022.

When communicating with book donors, it is usually best to say "We seek paperback books in the following categories..." and keep emphasizing that "paperback" books are the only ones we seek.

However, under certain circumstances, we do accept hardcover books. The following list of hardcover books we accept is intended for volunteers who sort or shelve books. The information will also be useful for volunteers who are explicitly asked by book donors whether we will accept specific hardcover books they wish to donate. (Please do not send donors a link to this page, since the page links to other pages not intended for the general public to see. Instead, refer to the list yourself and answer donors' questions accordingly.)

The list will be amended as needed in response to changes in our inventory.

We accept:

• Popular fantasy and sci-fi novels, e.g. any of the Harry Potter books - show these to Megan instead of shelving them
• Popular books (not classics) in Spanish - show these to Jen instead of shelving them
• How-to-draw books, if 100% free of nudity
• English dictionaries - must be in fairly good condition, have a copyright year of 1980 or later, and not contain more than 2,000 pages (see below for explanation)
• Books that will be sent to prison book clubs
• Study Bibles (not regular Bibles, which we're usually drowning in)
• Books for learning a trade
• Role-playing game books
• Joke books
• Manga
• Any other genres in which we currently have a critical shortage. This is obviously a very vague category, but may include books like Arabic-English dictionaries.

An explanation of the criteria for hardcover dictionaries: The simplest criterion is that dictionaries should be in fairly good condition (not falling apart), in order to maximize the number of prisons that will accept them. We also want them to be reasonably recent so that they will contain all the words prisoners seek definitions for. "Reasonably recent" is too subjective a standard to be useful, so we picked 1980 as the cutoff year. We also wanted to implement a size limit, eliminating the truly enormous dictionaries that are sometimes donated, but "truly enormous" is another very subjective term. Ideally, we would state a weight limit, but those are of little use when communicating with donors who don't have a scale handy. An examination of big hardcover books revealed that limiting pages to around 2,000 would allow us to send all the dictionaries we currently send, while eliminating those that are ridiculously big.

Our intention is not for experienced volunteers who are shelving dictionaries to open every dictionary and examine the number of pages. The page limit is intended more as a helpful guideline to give to a donor who says "I have an excellent hardcover dictionary in my office that I'd like to donate to you, but it's so big that I'm not sure you could use it". Now, instead of a long discussion about what "so big" actually means, we can simply respond with "If it contains fewer than 2,000 pages and has a copyright date of 1980 or later, we'll take it!"