book dumping

noun

The practice of donating old used books that burden rather than assist communities.

Ask AI about this wordChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

Meanings

nounbook dumping (uncountable)
  1. idiomaticuncountableThe practice of donating old used books that burden rather than assist communities.

    2003 Donna Nixon, "From North Carolina to KwaZulu Natal: World Library Partnership," North Carolina Libraries, Winter 2003, pp. 146-151. Many book donation programs, though well-intentioned, engage in “book dumping,” a practice of shipping old used books that burden rather than assist communities.

    2 more examples

    ...there is some sensitivity in Africa to being the recipient of the West's unwanted or secondhand surplus goods, and sometimes well-intentioned gifts of educational materials have been criticized by their recipients as examples of "book dumping" - equivalent, that is, to garbage disposal or to the removal to Africa of European and American toxic wastes.

    1993 Bernth Lindfors, "Desert Gold: Irrigation Scemes for Ending the Book Drought," in D. Riemenschneider and F. Shultze-Engler, eds. African Literatures in the Eighties, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1993. p. 36

    ... the unfortunate reality for much of the developing world has been that a combination of book dumping, poverty and underfunding of libraries has severely limited the ability of librarians to collect relevant, high-quality resources (Sturges, 2014; Edem, 2010; Otike, 1993).

    2015 Elizabeth Giles, "Evaluating Lubuto Library Collections: A Case Study in Dynamic and Strategic Children’s Collection Development," IFLA WLIC 2015
  2. uncountableliteralThe discarding of quantities of books.

    Since January, the book-dumping has ceased, following an expose by the San Francisco Chronicle.

    1996 October 14, Nicholson Baker, “The Author vs. the Library”, in The New Yorker, page 50
Cite this entry
APA

book dumping. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/book%20dumping

MLA

“book dumping.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/book%20dumping. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “book dumping,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/book%20dumping.

Source: book dumping on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.