About this site
Charity Shop Books is written by the small team behind Spines, an iOS app that identifies every book on a shelf from a single photograph. We built the app because we're the sort of people who can't walk past a charity shop, and we started this site because the craft of hunting second-hand books well — reading spines, judging condition, timing the shelves — was scattered across folklore and deserved writing down properly.
Where the money comes from
The honest disclosure: the links to Spines on this site are ours, and if you download the app we benefit. That's the entire business model. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored posts, and no shop pays to be mentioned — or ever will.
Our editorial rules
- Nothing invented. We don't publish statistics we can't stand behind, reviews that didn't happen, or plausible-sounding shop listings we haven't verified.
- Shops appear in our city guides only once we've confirmed the details ourselves, which is why those directories grow slowly.
- When we're unsure of a fact, we leave it out. A shorter true page beats a longer confident one.