Your Trusted Store for Used Books in Coldbrook
Who wouldn’t mind paying good money for a book? But why pay more when you can walk into a book store, browse through aisles, and find a book you love that’s been used gently. At Books Galore, we pride ourselves on being a brick-and-mortar store that carries a wide variety of used books in Coldbrook. We serve customers all over Coldbrook, Annapolis Valley West, and Annapolis Valley East. At our store, you’ll find aisles full of mystery novels and young adult books, science-fiction and fantasy titles, general fiction, romance novels, non-fiction titles, and more. We also have drawers full of extra copies of books by prolific authors. Instead of devoting an entire bookcase to display a hundred Nora Roberts or James Patterson books, we keep a few of their newer titles on the shelves and relegate many of the rest of the titles to drawers. You can also find cabinets showcasing a display of mostly 500 and 1000 piece puzzles and a display of children’s picture books. If you bring in books you want to give away, we’ll offer you credit that you can redeem.
To round out the inventory, we also offer collector cards such as Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Pokemon, along with card supplies. You cannot use in-store credit for the cards since it costs us money to buy them, so it only seems fair for the customer to have to pay money for them in turn.
We also have a ‘request a book’ section at the store where you can tell us any title you need. We keep the request on file for two months and try our best to bring it in for you.
How Our Credit System Works
We offer credit to customers in exchange for used books, and you can bring them to us anytime. The credit voucher has a "Please redeem by" date stamped on it that's dated two years into the future. The purpose of that is to encourage you to use the card in good time but also to limit liability in the event that the store is ever sold.
We offer three types of credit based on the kinds of books you bring to us:
​ Serialized Romance We offer credit for serialized romance books that usually have a month’s date on the spine. Our serialized romance books are sold for a dollar each, and we trade 2:1. You can redeem the credit given for this type of book only for more of the same.
​ Hard-covered and Trade-sized Paperbacks These are books that are taller than a "Pocket novel" and don't fit on our regular bookshelves. We keep them on the top bookshelves where they can fit, and they tend to accumulate. Since there seems to be no shortage of these books, you can get credit for these and can only use them for more of the same.
​ Paperback and Hard-covered Non-fiction/Children’s Books/Literature Any type of book that isn't a Harlequin-type monthly romance or a book that we would classify as hard-covered fiction can come under this category. For most paperback books (excluding trade-sized paperbacks), customers receive one-quarter of the cover price in credit. This type of credit can be used for any book in the store without restriction.
Rule of Thumb for Book Exchange
If you want us to accept your used book, you can bring them to us anytime. We’re happy to calculate the credit in a relatively short time while you browse or wait, and whatever credit you don’t redeem during that visit, the remainder will be written on a credit voucher to be handed over to you to use at a future date. But, we have a few rules:
​ We don't commit to accepting books without seeing them first.
​ We do not take condensed Reader's Digest books.
​ We do not accept encyclopedia sets.
​ Books should be in relatively good condition — no snips.
​ Books should not have a "blue dot" on the bottom; that's a bingo dauber mark signifying it may be a discounted book sold by Books Galore.
If you have more questions about the credit system, you can reach us by phone before you bring in any books.
COVID-19 Restrictions and Protocol
Currently, we require you to wear masks and have hand sanitizers available. We have adopted the habit of calculating and issuing credit IOUs first, then boxing up the books and storing them for several days before bringing them out of storage to price and to put them on the shelves. It has the benefit of spreading out our workload and seems to be a good precaution to take if we were to get a notice that a customer had dropped off books and was diagnosed the next day.
