Online book swapping, the Internet’s Used Bookstore
My wife and I are planning on moving in the next few months. We’ve started to empty out the basement and have successfully gotten rid of stuff (and made money at it too) on eBay and Craig’s List. We also started going through the various book shelves in our house and deciding what to keep (i.e. pay someone to haul across the country) and what not to keep.
I’ve had a crate of used paperback and hardback books in the basement for months. When friends come over, we offer them any book in the crate that they want free of charge just to get it off our hands. We don’t have a local used bookstore so we were going to toss them if we couldn’t pass them on. We are trying to be environmentally friendly and were loathe to put the stuff in the trash so we have identified ways to recycle them (our local recycle pickup will accept paperback books and the local YMCA will take old text books and hardback books). However, even that just seemed wasteful.
I was browsing Lifehacker Top 10s recently and came across the top 10 internet freebies and links to two popular book swapping services; PaperBackSwap.com and BookMooch.com. I’ve used them for a week or so now and here’s my review.
First off, you do have to pay postage to send your books out. If you are mailing from the US to the US you can use the USPS Media Mail rate, so a typical paperback book will cost $2.23 to mail (a book under 6oz (a small paperback) can be sent using USPS First Class for $1.68). So if you’re tight on cash the trash bin or recycle bin may be the best answer. However, in my opinion, the book selection on both sites is excellent so I will be able to get books for free when we land at our new residence.
Both sites work on a credit basis. Basically, you get a credit for each book you send and deducted a credit for each book you receive. Additionally, both sites give you a few credits for just posting your books so you can get started getting used books in the mail even before someone requests one of your books.
Of the two, PaperBackSwap.com has a much slicker interface that is easy to navigate, easy to post books, and a better social networking features. For shipping books there is a very nice feature that generates a PDF to either wrap the book with or tape to other packaging. For a small fee the PDF can include delivery confirmation and/or even include postage. In exchange for the fee you get “credited” for the book immediatly upon shipping and don’t have to wait for the receiver to use the site to “accept” the book for you to get credited. As far as I’ve been able to tell, the site is for inside the US only.
BookMooch.com does not have fees anywhere on the site (with the exceptions of donations). They support the site on a volunteer basis and pay for bandwidth and servers with donations and funds from Amazon.com if a user buys a book (new) from Amazon if it is not available from another user. The operator even seems averse to commercializing the site. The interface is a bit clunky and browsing books is done more with searches and tables of text. Many users of BookMooch are outside of the US and you choose if you can honor their request or not depending on how much it will cost to ship a book to a foreign location. However, if you do agree to ship internationally, you get additional credits.
I had my books listed on PaperBackSwap for a week or so before I also posted my books on BookMooch where I immediatly received requests for books which I had not on the other site, including several international requests (I may have been cheating by listing my books on both sites). If someone requests a book from one site, I immediatly remove it from the other site. Only in one case did I have a request for the same book on both sites overnight.
Using both the sites, I’ve been able to get rid of about two dozen books in a little over a week which also gives me several credits which I will use to get books in the future.
Here’s a list of the books I am giving away on BookMooch (I can’t find a method of lisitng my inventory on PaperBackSwap but it’s the same books).