FREE STUDENT TEXTBOOK EXCHANGE · DUBAI & ABU DHABI

Free textbooks. Collected from a station, never a stranger.

Students list the textbooks they’ve finished with. You claim one and collect it at a pickup station using a secure code — no payments, no shipping, no meeting up.

How it works Get the app

Available now on Android — Google Play version coming soon.

The book travels. You two never meet.

Every exchange goes through a designated pickup station. The giver drops the book off during their window; you collect it later with your code. There’s no meeting, no address, no phone number.

Giver

Drops the book off

Takes it to the station they chose, inside the drop-off window.

Pickup station

Holds the book

Station staff confirm the drop-off, and your secure pickup code appears in the app.

You

Collect with your code

Show the code at the station inside your collection window and take the book home.

Never happens — no meeting, no numbers, no addresses.

The book goes giver → pickup station → you. The two students never meet and never exchange contact details.

About the Creator

You don’t need a big company to solve a real problem.

— Zaid

Meet Mohammad Zaid Aamir

Founder, designer & developer of BookSwap

At the end of each school year, the same thing kept happening: perfectly good textbooks thrown away, only for other students to buy the very same titles again the next year. Books that could easily have been passed on were going to waste.

Mohammad Zaid Aamir, a Year 10 student at Cambridge International School Dubai, decided to do something about it.

Instead of ignoring the problem, he built something to solve it.

With no team and no budget, Zaid taught himself to design and develop a complete mobile app from the ground up, building every screen, every feature, and every line of the system that makes it work. The result is BookSwap: a free, non-profit platform that lets students give their old textbooks a second life instead of throwing them away, and helps others find the books they need at no cost.

BookSwap isn’t about buying or selling. It’s about a simple idea: that a textbook one student is finished with is exactly the book another student is looking for. By connecting them through safe, on-campus pickup stations, BookSwap turns waste into opportunity, keeps books in circulation, and saves students money along the way.

What began as one student’s observation about everyday waste has grown into a mission: to build a community where sharing beats spending, and nothing useful goes to waste.

Four steps, from search to shelf.

That’s the whole flow. The full guide covers claim limits, collection windows, and what happens if plans change.

Browse

Search by title or author, and filter by category or pickup station.

Claim

Reserve the book you need. Claims are first-come and binding.

Pickup code

Once the station confirms the drop-off, your pickup code appears in the app.

Collect

Show your code at the station and the book is yours, free.

Read the full guide →

Why students use it.

It costs nothing, the handover is designed so you never meet the other student, and a good textbook gets to work for one more student.

Free, with no catch

Every book is given away. There are no fees, no payments and no shipping charges anywhere in the app.

Handed over at a station

Books change hands through designated pickup stations using a secure code, so you never meet another student or share contact details.

Textbooks stay in use

A textbook does not stop being useful when a course ends. Passing it on keeps it in circulation and saves the next student the cost of buying one.

Claims are binding.

First come, first served — only claim a book you’ll actually go and collect.

Five at a time.

You can hold up to five active claims while you work through collecting them.

Mind the window.

The giver has five days from the claim to drop the book off; you then have three days from the station’s confirmation to collect it. Missing a window counts against your account standing.

GET STARTED

Your old textbooks are somebody’s next semester.

A book that carried one student through a course can carry the next one too. BookSwap is free to use and free to list on, for students in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.