About Seashell Books
Seashell Books is a privately held corporation based in Clearwater, Florida. Since our inception in 2001 our goal has been to offer "Affordable Books for Everyone". Our facilities in Florida currently maintain an inventory well in excess of 1 million books. Our staff of over 40 employees is dedicated to serving our customers' every need.
Seashell's Green
At Seashell Books we are also proud to be at the forefront of the green earth movement on our own small part of the planet. As we begin our 8th year of operations our business model is geared to saving literally hundreds of thousands of tons of books that prior to our existence were being placed into landfills across the country every year. Seashell Books is by nature a "green" company; Aside from the obvious resale of reading materials at bargain prices, Books that arrive at our facilities damaged beyond any further reuse by consumers are processed and delivered to a recycler where the paper products contained there in are made into a wealth of products ranging from tissue and paper towels to copier paper and a wide range of other recycled paper products. Seashell Books saves 40 tons of "damaged beyond resale" paper products per month from entering landfills in the USA and over 80 tons per month total from being land filled.
Buying recycled paper is an equally important step in the recycling process - it closes the recycling loop. Even though trees are a renewable resource, much energy and landfill space can be conserved when we buy recycled content paper.
"Buy a used book and save the planet."
Promoting the integration of persons with disabilities in the workplace
Seashell Books has an employment partnership with Vincent House, a non-profit agency serving persons with mild mental illnesses in Pinellas County. This collaborative effort led to the development of transitional employment placements at SeashellBooks.com. Transitional employment is a hallmark of the Vincent House Clubhouse Model of rehabilitation and provides its members with the chance to develop skills and build self-confidence while employed in competitive work settings at comparable wages to other employees.
At SeashellBooks.com, Vincent House members are hired and trained to do some of the processing, cataloging, and data entry of incoming used books and processing orders for shipment. Our Vincent House employees perform just part of the many steps needed to make our over one million books available to the public and we hold them as valuable assets to our company.
Promoting Literacy in our community and around the world
Seashell Books also contributes to several charitable causes, including the Kiwanis Club "Head Start Book Reading & Donation" program. The Reading Program partnership has been featured on local WTVT: Fox 13 News. This joining of forces between local Kiwanis Club of Seminole Breakfast, Head start in both Pinellas and Hillsborough counties Florida and Seashellbooks.com, Inc. enables volunteers to provide an outlet for delivering free books too and the reading of books to Tampa / St. Petersburg / Clearwater / and Tampa bay area pre-school Children. Many of the children are participants of federally funded programs such as Head Start. The success of the program has created a large demand for books as well as volunteers who process the books and conduct group book readings to the children! Books are also donated free of charge to area school reading programs that can make use of them in a climate of strapped budgets and education cuts. This alliance has also been able to assist several schools and children's libraries around the world in places as far away as Ecuador and the Philippines. SeashellBooks.com currently donates in excess of 300,000 children's books to these charitable causes annually.
Our Customer Service department staff can be reached through the "contact us" link on this website, or by calling toll free at 1-866-496-2692 Monday thru Friday, 8:00am - 4:00pm EST during normal business hours. Although we'd love to meet each customer personally, our mail order warehouse in Florida is not equipped for retail sales or walk-in customers.
Please place your orders through this web site. Thank you.