Today I’m sharing how to get thrift store prices on books without leaving your home. This is such important knowledge, if you are a book lover and/or homeschooler! If you are not one of those, just skip this post. Go learn how to make Greek yogurt here, read some review of date night movies here, or read about my trip to Orchard House last year here.
OK, if you love books and love thrifting, read on. Say you are stuck at home because you have a lot of little children that preclude you from having a reasonably sane shopping trip at the thrift store, or you are ill, but not so ill that you can’t do some online shopping, but too ill to go out shopping. Maybe you don’t have any one of those situations, but you need a specific book for your family read aloud time, a hobby of you or your child, your book club, or a class at your child’s homeschool co-op. Or maybe you just have a need for a dopamine pick me up that comes from finding just the right book at just the right price that fits your mood that day.
However you fit into the above categories, if you have read this far, you probably share this overall condition with me:
Any excuse to buy books right?! So let’s talk about thrifting for books from the comfort of your couch at home, poolside, sipping lemonade, in an airport, or up in the mountains, still with an Internet connection.
First of all, go to addall.com.
Now, prepare to be amazed!
If you are thrifty book lover, or a bibliophilic thrifter, however you describe yourself, this is going to be your best non-human friend ever! You’re welcome!!
You’ve probably bought used books online from thriftbooks.com or alibris.com or even amazon. Well, this site allows you to take all of your online book shopping to a whole new level! It allows you to find deals on books you love, and on books you are going to love that you didn’t even know existed!
The reason addall.com is so swell is because it does all the comparison shopping for you at used book websites all across the Internet, at the sites I just mentioned, and more.
OK, so when you are at addall.com, just type in the info of the book you are looking for, and voila, in less than a minute, you can find the cheapest price for the book across the Interverse (Internet universe). For the book’s info, you can use either the author, the title, the ISBN number, or even just a keyword.
Here is what my phone’s screen looks like when I looked for a treasury of Beatrix Potter stories.
The overall price is the red number in the red box: $8.97. That includes shipping, at least in the continental US! True, this isn’t a huge bargain like if you found the book for $1 or $2 at your neighborhood thrift store or used library book sale. It’s still a great deal though, since the retail price of a new copy is $19.99 on amazon. If you had to drive a long ways to find this at a thrift store, and counted the cost of gas and the cost of the time it would take you to hunt down the book, the addall price is probably worth it for you. It just depends on how much you want this specific book and how far you’d have to go and how long it would take to find it. As they say, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. If you can find it this cheap on addall.com, get it while you can, even if you could possibly get it cheaper at a thrift store with only the possibility, not the certainty, that you could find it.
So, if you wanted to buy this BP Treasury copy at the price shown in red above, click on the word “Amazon” in green, inside the green box. It will take you to amazon and then you buy the book there.
So addall is like having your very own personal shopper’s assistant, or a thrifty girlfriend, who goes out and scouts out the deals, showing you all the used copies for sale, from the lowest to the highest prices. So go ahead, bookmark the site now. You’ll be having a lot of fun with it!
Here’s another search I did, for a Reader’s Digest songbook. So far I have the Christmas, Popular Classics, and Children’s songbooks in the RD series of songbooks. The series has 14 in all, according to goodreads.com, here. I got the Christmas songbook for my 16th birthday, and the other two I found thrifting just this past summer. I love being able to play the Indiana Jones March, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Christmas songs, and so many other fun songs from these books.
These books are so wonderful for a piano player! Each book has dozens of songs, is huge, so easy to read, and spiral-bound, so they lie flat. (Every single book out there full of sheet music should have lie-flat spiral binding, just sayin.’)
So you pay $3.57 base price, $4.59 for shipping (sorry, the shipping price above is covered up by the privacy terms symbol) which totals $8.06 for this songbook of tunes from the 1950s. This would make a perfect gift for someone like my parents who were teens in the 1950s, or anyone who loves 50s music. Elvis, anyone?
Is your mind starting to go wild with the bookish possibilities of what you can find with this website?
Here are more examples. Below are some books any homeschooling mom would love to find at a thrift store, with how much you can get them using addall, as of the day I did the search, 9/3/25.
Say, you are doing Five in a Row, a curriculum for preschoolers. This is a fun unit study plan where you read aloud the same picture book five days in a row. Each day, after you read the book, you do a different activity related to the book. One day it’s an aspect of the book that relates to geography/social studies, another day, it’s science, another day, it’s math, another, it’s art, another, it’s language arts. It’s super fun! (I attempted to do it one year with my two oldest but was just not organized enough to keep it up but if you are organized, go for it.) Anyway, one of the books featured in this curriculum is the classic book, The Story About Ping. So say you are doing Five in a Row and can’t find a copy of Ping from your public library, which is not surprising since public libraries are getting rid of children’s book pre-1980 more and more these days.
Cheapest addall’s price: base $1.80 plus $3.99 shipping for a total of $5.79. Score!
$1.24 + $4.49 = $5.73
I’ve been wanting the above book for years. I’ve been surprised that my public library doesn’t have the picture book versions of Narnia. What a great buy for such a splendid book!
How about some Anne of Green Gables?
$2.36 + $3.99 = $6.35
Guess what came up, this beautiful edition above. Not a paperback copy, but a beautifully illustrated cover book in a slipcase, perfect for gifting! Only $6.35 total! Amazing!!!
If you are like me, you thought you had all 8 of the Anne books in the series from when you were a teen, and you just discovered that #3 is missing after moving and finally having a place to shelve all the books. You can find it on addall! This one is $1.37 + $3.99 shipping, total $5.36. If I hadn’t have found one when I went thrifting back in July, I would have gotten it here.
Now, here’s a classic book that I never knew about until I homeschooled. The book below won a Newbery Medal in 1956. It’s the story of a real man, Nathaniel Bowditch, who was the founder of modern maritime navigation. He grew to manhood in Salem, Massachusetts, overcoming many obstacles, including having to go work full-time as a young teen to help support his family. The Modern Practical Navigator, authored by him, is carried on every commissioned American naval vessel to this day. You can even buy it on amazon here. This biography of Nathaniel, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, is such a great book! It’s often required reading for LEMI’s Pyramid Project, a math and science class. If you haven’t read it or had your children read it, you are missing out! Get it and read it! At the price below, you can read your own copy. You can listen to it free in YouTube here.
$1.34 + $4.49 = $5.83
How about something for mother culture?
Anything by Susan Branch will fill the bill. Here’s her book Christmas Joy.
99 cents + $4.49 = $5.48. What a great deal! You can see my review of her Summer book here and her Autumn book here. Reading these books is like chatting with a dear girlfriend, filling you to the brim with yumminess. Her books are all so fun!
Now, how about, the DK Complete Book of Sewing? As of today, this book on amazon is $25.06, base price, without even adding the shipping cost.
Using addall.com, you can get it for $2.75, plus $4.49 shipping, for a grand total of $7.24. Sweet!
I still have my Usborne Puzzle books that I bought in the late 1990s for my older children. The series has about 8 books or so, and I bought most of them back then. Each has a different theme like castle, mountain, planet, etc. These are delightful books that involve “seek and find” activities along with mazes and other visual activities, following a super fun storyline of a child or a pair of children going on a themed adventure. All 7 of my children have loved these through the years, and now I read them to my grandchildren. My married daughter loves them so much that she wants to collect them now. Sadly, they are out of print from Usborne. Addall didn’t have any individual ones the day I looked but had books that were 3 titles in one. Below is the price for Puzzle World.
$4.04 + $3.09 = $8.03. A great buy!
.99 + $5.49 + $5.48. I’m totally going to get this book for my drummer son!
$4.45 + $4.49 = $8.94. I’ve read two of Patricia St. John’s books and love them. Now I want to read her story. It’s hard to find this book at any library. Listen to this podcast below to know why she’s so amazing.
Want some motivation to read aloud to your children? Here you go! This book is only $2.29 + $4.49 = $6.78. If you want to know all about the book, go here, where I have a podcast episode about it from Sarah Mackenzie of readaloudrevival.com
.99 + $4.49 = $5.48
$1.29 + $4.49 = $5.78
$5.43 + $4.49 = $9.92. I needed this book once for a class my teen daughter took at our co-op. It was all checked out at the public library, and then over $20 on amazon, not available through Prime, and took over two weeks to arrive! Her class discussion was over by the time it arrived. If only I had known about addall.com back then.
Here are some tips for using addall.com:
- Don’t expect to find newly-released books by bestselling authors. But do expect to find books that have been out for at least a year.
2. Have the spirit of treasure hunt thrifting. That is, you might not find exactly what you want, but be willing to be grateful and surprised with the unexpected treasure. You might be looking for, say, The Lord of the Rings and can’t find it at a low price but instead you find the Hobbit devotional book, above for $2.29 + $4.49 =$ 6.78. So awesome! Get that instead and keep waiting for the LOTR to come down in price, while in the meantime you borrow a copy from the public library or a neighbor.
3. Think about a favorite book of a loved one, then use addall to see if you can find a deluxe version, like the Anne of Green Gables book in the slipcase I showed up above, a pretty boxed set of a series, an annotated version, a cookbook inspired by the book, or some kind of treasury from that author, to give as a gift. If giving the item as a gift, be sure to check the notes about the item to make sure it’s in giftable condition, not with writing inside or tears, or a bent cover.
4. Be willing to go back and check the prices for a much wanted book. Prices can change daily and I’m assuming books are added to the searchable inventory daily as well.
5. If you are new to homeschooling/collecting books/reading for education and fun, have a list from one of these sites of recommended books below, and keep them handy on your phone or in your purse so you can know what books are worth buying and keeping.
Tree of Life Mothering 