Where to buy used books in San Jose

Updated 9/3/2026

Spot map

The best spots

All spots by type

Local sourcing tips

• San Jose alone spans four corners of this map — West Valley near the Cupertino line, Berryessa to the north, Village Square out east in Evergreen, and Recycle Bookstore and Pearl Avenue closer to the center — so being "in San Jose" doesn't mean a short drive between stops. Santa Clara and Campbell sit close enough to the Alameda for one loop, but Saratoga, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Mountain View, Milpitas and Fremont each add twenty minutes or more of driving in traffic that gets worse after 3pm on weekdays. Pair Recycle Bookstore's two locations with a Book-Go-Round stop in Saratoga for one afternoon, and save Fremont and Milpitas — on opposite sides of the bay's northern tip — for separate trips.
• Store credit beats cash almost everywhere in this guide. Leigh's Favorite Books hands back store credit worth half a purchase's price within three months of buying it, and Recycle Bookstore's buyback counter, open Tuesday through Saturday at both its locations, pays in either cash or credit depending on what a staffer decides a stack is worth. None of the Friends of the Library operations pay for donations at all — they're all give, not trade — so keep anything you actually want cash for out of that pile.
• Nearly every city named in this guide runs its book sales through a volunteer Friends group rather than a storefront that's open daily, and each keeps its own calendar: quarterly in Milpitas and Mountain View, monthly in Santa Clara, Campbell and at FOPAL, three times a year in Fremont, two or three times a year in Cupertino and Saratoga, plus a separate calendar for each San Jose branch. Confirm dates directly on the relevant organization's site before driving out — a date can shift by a week from what an older printout says.
• Three names that keep surfacing on older lists no longer work the way they used to. Willow Glen Books, on Lincoln Avenue, was reported closing in 2009 after failing to find a buyer, per that spring's Mercury News coverage, and no current site or directory shows it trading today. BookBuyers, the Castro Street fixture in downtown Mountain View for more than 25 years, closed its store in April 2016 after lackluster sales and a failed search for a new space nearby, as the Mountain View Voice and Palo Alto Online both reported that spring, and it never reopened in the area. And the walk-in bookstore the Friends of the King Library once ran near the SJSU side of San Jose's main library was eliminated in 2020 to free the room for a voting location, Metro Silicon Valley wrote in May 2022 — branch-level sales, including several named in this guide, kept going regardless.
• By our own measurement, Bell's Books on Emerson Street in downtown Palo Alto sits roughly 1.4 miles outside this guide's box, so it stays off the spot list even though it's family-run since 1935 and marked ninety years in business with a literary festival the Palo Alto Weekly covered on October 16, 2025. FOPAL's three-room sale, over at Palo Alto's Cubberley Community Center on Middlefield Road, sits inside the line and makes the list; Redwood City, Burlingame and San Mateo fall further out still and belong to a different guide.
• Not every secondhand-looking storefront in this valley sells books. Books Inc. in Campbell and Banter Bookshop in Fremont both describe themselves as new-book shops on their own sites, and the Force Exchange thrift store in San Jose funds youth job training through vintage clothing, not books, according to its own about page. The Nearly New Shop in Sunnyvale is the one general thrift store in this guide with a books line confirmed on its own site — donated stock there funds scholarships for women attending college rather than the shop itself.

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