I urge you all to visit one of my favourite web-sites, BookMooch:
When I say all, I actually mean all of you who read books, have a number of books you no longer want, have some books that you’d like to read, and don’t mind posting some books. If you don’t meet those criteria then you probably won’t be interested in a book swapping web-site.
BookMooch works in a very simple way. You join for free, and list any books that you no longer want (and recieve 0.1 points for each one you list). Then you create a wishlist of books that you want. Other users mooch books from the ones you have listed, and you get a point for each one (or 3 points if you send them to another country). You can then use your acquired points to mooch books from others (1 point per book, or 2 points to get one from abroad). It’s a great way to turn books you don’t want to those you do, for the price of postage.
I won’t pretend that you will get every book that you want right away – not unless you only want John Grisham and Stephen King novels. You’re dependent on others giving away stuff you’re interested in, and there’s a good chance that a whole bunch of people will also be waiting for it. I maintain my wishlist at about 150 books, just to give myself a better chance of being successful. That said, I joined on 3rd January 2008 and have mooched 50 books, which I think is a pretty reasonable return.
Anyway, stop reading this now and go join up. You might have something I want to mooch.
Posted by Reading Habits – An Introduction « Pour Some Gravy On Me on August 26, 2009 at 9:31 am
[...] stop buying books. For the last few years my main source of books has been charity shops and Bookmooch. Both these methods are great for getting books that you want for cheap, but it does mean that [...]
Posted by Reading Habits – August 2009 « Pour Some Gravy On Me on September 9, 2009 at 8:51 am
[...] the books he has read and bought during that month (sound familiar?). I got the book through Bookmooch, primarily because I’ve read, and enjoyed, some of Hornby’s novels, and because I liked [...]
Posted by darabuc on January 23, 2010 at 12:20 pm
I’ve been in the Bookmooch net for some three months and it’s been pretty useful for me, as I live in a sparsely populated country area where you cannot easily get to swap books. And I found as well some nice out-of-print books which surely aren’t a treasure in bibliophile terms, but made me happy indeed (for example some volumes of poetry for kids). I do recommend the site.