Oxfam Books - Second Hand & Used Books For Cheap in the UK

1 August 2019 at 9:00 am

What is Oxfam Books?

Oxfam, the international charity, sells second hand and used books for cheap in the UK. You can buy Oxfam books online or in Oxfam shops. Some stores only sell books and you can find some great bargains.

What books can you find in Oxfam?

Fiction, fantasy, first edition, biographies, Penguin, children's books and more. Online, Oxfam books are categorised, but in-store you may find they are jumbled up together.

I love going to charity shops and rummaging through their books. Every day they receive new donations. I buy cooking books, history books and bestsellers.

Here is a book I bought from a charity shop today - Scorn, by Matthew Parris. It's a very funny book full of jokes, insults and put-downs said by famous people.

Where Can I Buy Oxfam Books?

Oxfam has a website store on which you can buy books. Delivery is £3.95 and the prices really vary. Online, there is also a signed category, meaning that the author of the book has written their signature inside. This can increase the value of the book and be nice gesture as a gift if you know someone who particularly likes this author.

Where Else Can I Buy Second Hand Books?

Some of the books can be expensive, which is why it pays to still shop around. One of my favourite online bookstores is AbeBooks. AbeBooks is a marketplace connecting you with hundreds of independent booksellers across the world. They sell many second hand books.

Search by Author, Title, or Keyword to find the book you are interested in, or just browse their curated collections. They have everything from poetry to plays, manga comics to wartime ephemera, vintage magazines to old maps.

AwesomeBooks is another second hand book store online selling used books. It stocks over 2 million books in their distribution centre and best of all, free standard delivery in the UK. This can be quite a big saving over Amazon books or other retailers.

In this article on theBBC, manager of Oxfam Sally Lee says the market of second hand books has changed unrecognisably in the last two decades she has been working.

Now, there is big demand for "mid-market collectibles". Things that are worth more than a few pounds but not enough to send to auction.

World of Books is another online second hand book store. It began when its founders noticed a pile of books from a charity shop being chucked for landfill.

Similar to AbeBooks and AwesomeBooks, you can find cheap used books across all categories: Fiction, history, autobiography and more.

World of Books also does free standard delivery in the UK which makes it very cheap compared to buying new books.

I particularly like their best-selling non-fiction category as you can usually find the latest novels for a few pounds.

Reading is one of the best and yet cheapest pleasures in life - especially if you buy used and second-hand books from Oxfam, AwesomeBooks or World of Books.