Textbooks for Change has placed two donation boxes at Carleton, one in the MacOdrum Library and the other in the River Building.
The organization re-sells some of the books online on Amazon at a discounted price to students, donates other ones to universities in Africa, and recycles unusable books.
Brady Burke, marketing director at Textbooks for Change, said the organization generally accepts all textbooks published within the past 15 years and the books are divided based on quality and demand.
“The recycling is basically quality control . . . books that are outdated, damaged, or not relevant to anyone in North America or East Africa,” Burke said. “After that, 50 per cent we are going to donate to campuses in East Africa.”
He said the books they donate are based on requests from schools in Kenya and have a positive social impact. The ones they sell to students cost $40 on average, cheaper than ones sold in stores, he said.
“In East Africa and for the students on campus there, there is a very good quality material going over there, [a] massive improvement of what was currently in the library and . . . those materials will be used over and over again.”
Ashley Fleischer, the Discovery Centre administrator at Carleton, said donations have been piling up since the drop-boxes were put in the library.
“The one in the Discovery Centre has been very popular. It fills quickly with donations and often has piles of books on top and adjacent to it,” she said. “We now have an arrangement with [a] crew to check an overflow area each time they come to retrieve the accumulated books.”
However, students are not the only ones coming to drop off books, as faculty members have also been donating their extra used books.
“Our biggest donation to date recently came from the psychology department, which donated eight large boxes filled with extra stock textbooks from years past,” Fleischer said. “People seem to appreciate the opportunity to give their [books] to charity where they will be recycled and used in parts of the world where quality books are scarce.”
Kendra Kading, Carleton’s Textbooks for Change brand ambassador, said that since the drop-boxes have come to campus, students and the rest of the community have been responding positively to their arrival.
“We only started in March of 2016 at Carleton, but in the limited time we had there was great response from students and organizations or clubs on campus.”
