Kids are expensive. Their stuff is expensive too. You want to encourage a love of reading in your child but all those books are expensive too. Trying to figure out how to balance encouraging a love of reading with the cost of all the books is tricky, but it turns out there are some great resources to help mitigate the costs.
Purchasing children’s books from discounted online retailers as well as using free resources from local libraries and open source material will help keep the cost of new books low or even completely free. As a general rule, being flexible about the title and condition of the book will keep the costs low as well.
Books, ebooks and even audiobooks are can be cheap or even totally free, if you know where to look.
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BookOutlet.com and KidsBooks.com
Book Outlet offers discounts at half or more on a lot of popular picture books. They offer free shipping on orders over $35, which is almost hard to do because everything is so cheap, but that is okay because anything under that has $5 flat rate shipping to the US and Canada and takes 3-10 business days.
Kids Books is the sister site to Book Outlet and has many similarities in terms of stock, however the website layout is different and a little more intuitive if you are only searching for children’s books. It provides tabs to automatically limit searches by ages, reading categories and book formats. Like it’s sister site, you can create an account and build a wishlist so you will always remember what you were looking for.
They purchase their product from publishers who have excess book stock, so while they are generally new sometimes they do show shelf-ware from being stored, handled or occasionally purchased and returned; they may not be as pristine as a newly purchased full price book from a traditional retailer. This option is best for picking up picture books and beginning reading books for kids who are avid readers or for adults and tweens looking for very popular titles, even if they are not the most recently published titles.
The Library
Most libraries are part of a system that has multiple locations which means even more books because they can be requested from other locations in the system. In addition to the wealth of books available, there are many other formats to choose from like ebooks, audiobooks, books on CD, books paired with audio formats.
Library cards are free for all users. Many library systems have special cards just for kids that offer perks for kids, like reduced fines, so be sure to ask about that.
If all of that weren’t enough, the library is full of helpful librarians who have read a lot of stuff and want to help you find your next favorite book. Children’s librarians are particularly excited to help you connect your child to a new favorite book and instill a love of reading and will be very happy to suggest as many books as you can carry.
Friends of the Library
Most libraries have book sales ongoing in some corner of the library run by the Friends of the Library; the funding from these sales helps put on events for the library or goes toward purchasing new library materials. You can often find new or like-new materials here that have been donated by the surrounding community.
Picture books, adult fiction, coffee table books, cookbooks, DVDs, CDs and sometimes more such as games or puzzles are all available at steeply discounted prices, many times only a few dollars or less.
The Friends of the Library will usually host a regularly scheduled sale. These are often very large sales where more things are available than are normally on display. Many locations will offer “bag sales” toward the end of the sale day where for the flat rate purchase of a paper bag you can fill it whatever and however much you can fit in the bag. This is a great way to find discounted copies of popular books, books you would never have thought to pick up, as well as decorative or vintage books for your bookshelf or party decorations
Bookbub.com
Bookbub specializes in ebooks and provides discounted ebooks formatted for Kindle, Apple Books, Nook, Google Play and more. The site runs similarly to Amazon’s lightning deals. Some ebooks are offered on a special deal for a limited time. After a certain number has been purchased at that price the deal is over and you can’t find them again, so if you see one you are interested in, buy it while it is available! There are so many good deals, from $0.99 to $1.99 on current best sellers, new releases and gems in every category.
Some of the newest released books can range from $5-10, but most books are available for around $2.99 or less, some are even completely free. Best seller books are released every Wednesday, so you know when to check back for the hottest books and can get a great deal.
This site is best for middle grade novels, teens and YA and adult fiction. There are a few children’s books offered (scroll to the bottom of the main page and choose “Children” as a category) and they are usually around $0.99 or free, but there is less of a selection than there is for full length novels.
Amazon Prime Reading Box
In this day pretty much everyone has an Amazon Prime subscription. Adding on a Prime Reading Box to your subscription is super easy, adds a small amount to your monthly charge and provides you with a curated selection of books for your child. You can choose to have a box scheduled to arrive every month, every other month or every three months, depending on how much you want to spend.
The cost of the box gets you two hardcover kids books (or four board books if your child is 2 years or younger), bringing them to less than their list price would actually be if you purchased them separately, and you know they will be new and popular titles.
Before the box ships you will get an email telling you which titles are going to be in the box, giving you the opportunity to swap out any you don’t want. After the box arrives, you have thirty days to exchange books you did not like.
If you happen to not have a Prime membership, you can follow this link to try it for free for 30 days. The free trial gives you all the great perks of Amazon Prime but free!
Book Scouter
Book Scouter has a slightly different model than other book purchasing sites as it both buys and sells used books for a variety of ages and categories. Unlike other sites, there are no lists of books by age or reading level, you enter a title, author or ISBN for the book you may be searching for and the site will tell you how much the book is worth if you were to sell it to them.
Then it lists all the websites selling that title, starting with the lowest price first (similar to if you were searching for airfare). The purchase prices and shipping rates will be up to whichever website you choose to purchase from, rather than everything being available directly from Book Scouter.
The main benefit of using this platform is that if you have a lot of books, you can sell them back through this website and get a check in the mail that you can put toward buying more books!
Free Little Library
The Little Free Library is a give-and-take kind of set up. They are set up all over cities and towns in different places. What’s there is there, you can take a book and leave one when you’ve finished. The website can tell you where to find them in your neighborhood. You can even make an event out of it with your kids and follow the map to find some different spots to trade books.
If you’re up for a project and can afford the extra expense you can even look into getting your own little library (which are not free if you want the official kit and for it to be on the official map).
Pro tip: Look for Little Free Libraries near libraries or schools where extra kids books are often donated!
Project Gutenberg
Classic novels are available as a download when they are considered public domain in the United States. A public domain book has no copyright, is not owned by an individual artist and can be used by the public without obtaining permission, but isn’t owned by anyone.
Project Gutenberg offers a number of different download options making books available as kindle downloads, text for computers or online reads. Some books even offer a version for an audiobook download. Just a note though, the audiobooks are created by volunteers, not professional narrators so the quality may vary from book to book.
One other thing to note is that because these are classic titles they are more likely suited for read-alouds with your child. The language will be a little more complex or ornate than contemporary novels.