Who Will Collect Unwanted Law Books for Free in the UK?

Getting a few boxes of novels collected for free is easy enough to arrange. A law library is a much heavier job, and the free book collections that come up first in a search have limits that a wall of law reports runs straight into.

Who will collect unwanted books for free in the UK?

Two kinds of service collect books from your door for free: charity doorstep collectors, and book buyback websites that send a courier.

Charity doorstep collectors take donations away for free and raise money from them for the charities they work with. Anglo Doorstep Collections, which describes itself as the UK's biggest doorstep collection company, is one. You book a slot online, pack the books into boxes or bags, label them and leave them outside your front door or in your porch for the driver. Its rules are worth reading before you start packing:

• There is a limit of 10 medium boxes of books per collection, and it asks that each box be no bigger or heavier than a driver can carry alone.
• It collects books from home properties only, and cannot collect from schools, libraries or charity shops.
• Books need to be in good condition, so anything with torn or missing pages has to stay behind.
• Its page on charity book collections lists reference books, such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias, among the books you can't donate. Its general list of what it collects does include reference books, so ask before you pack any.

Book buyback websites make you an offer for each book and pay for the delivery. World of Books, whose selling service used to be called Ziffit, is one of them. You scan each book's barcode with your phone, or type in its ISBN, and the site offers a price. A trade needs at least 10 items or £5 in value. If your trade weighs over 5kg, you are offered a free courier collection, and you pack the boxes yourself, each no heavier than 16kg. World of Books accepts only books that have an ISBN.

Who will pick up my books for free?

For ordinary books at home, either of those services will, as long as you stay inside their rules. For law books, three things decide it: where the books are, how many there are, and what kind of books they are.

Where they are. A doorstep collector that only collects from homes cannot help with a library in an office or a barristers' chambers.

How many there are. Law books come in sets, and the sets are long. Halsbury's Laws of England runs to 103 volumes in its fifth edition, and the English Reports to 178. A law library is counted in bays of shelving, and every box of it has to be packed and carried to the door before a doorstep collector or a courier arrives.

What kind they are. A buyback site prices each book by its ISBN, the number unique to each book that usually sits beside its barcode. The ISBN only became an international standard in 1970, so a bound volume of law reports from the 1950s has no number to scan and no way into the trade. And encyclopaedias such as Halsbury's are the very reference books that Anglo's book collection page lists among the books you can't donate.

So a box or two of recent law textbooks at home can go the same way as any other books. A run of law reports in an office needs a different kind of collector. Our guide to clearing thousands of books from a law library covers a library that size.

Does anyone pick up unwanted books?

Yes. Doorstep collectors and buyback couriers pick up ordinary books within the limits above, and law library buyers like us pick up collections of law books, as the next section explains.

The organisations that take donated law books work differently, because they take the books without collecting them. The International Law Book Facility, a charity that gives second-hand legal books to not-for-profit organisations, asks you to contact it before sending anything, and it cannot reimburse the cost of sending the books to its storage facility. The Law Society library welcomes donations of specific titles that would add to its collection, but it cannot buy books or cover your postage. With both, the packing and the carriage are yours. Our guide to donating law books sets out what each of them accepts.

Who will collect a law library for free?

Law library buyers like us. We come into the room, take the books off the shelves, pack them and carry them out, which is the part of the job the other routes leave to you.

This is how selling your law books to us works. You send photos of the shelves, or a list if you have one, and we value the collection for free. If you go ahead, the carriage is ours as well: we collect the books from anywhere in the UK without charging you, and we can arrange collection from abroad too. On top of that, we pay you for the books, into your bank account.

If part of the library has little resale value, we can talk about collecting it free of charge along with the rest.

We buy collections and sets: law reports, Halsbury's Laws and Halsbury's Statutes, encyclopaedias of forms and precedents, practitioner texts, journals and rare law books. We don't buy single textbooks, so a few textbooks on their own are better suited to the routes above. Our guide to where to sell old law books covers where single textbooks can go.

If you are clearing an office, our page on law firm library clearance covers clearing a firm's library for a move, a merger or a closure, and our guide to what to do with the library when a law firm closes covers who decides.

What to send so the collection can be arranged

For the valuation, photograph the shelves bay by bay, head-on and in good light, so the titles and years on the spines can be read. To arrange the collection, tell us the town or postcode, which floor the books are on, whether there is a lift, and where a van can stop. If there is a date the room must be clear by, tell us that too. Our checklist for preparing a law library for collection goes through the rest, including why the books are best left on the shelves.

When the photos and those details are ready, put them through the valuation form or WhatsApp them to 07920 748314, and we will value the collection and tell you which sets we can buy.