Never buy a book again - BookMooch

John Buckman presents BookMooch. The site's slogan is "Give books away. Get books you want." I'm a happy user. The site is completely noncommercial.

This vid doesn't really fit into a category, but if you're a reader (anywhere in the world), you'll probably like BookMooch.
winkler1says...

^ I think the secret sauce with the site is the founder. He 1) relentlessly promotes the site 2) has the tech skills to keep the site humming, and 3) has made some money with magnatunes so he can do it for free.

There's something wonderful and human about connecting users to exchange physical things. It reminds me of geocaching - swapping items of interest, sharing experiences. An antidote to the paranoia and distrust we live under these days.

Memoraresays...

hm, Perpetual Motion?
Since we're talking actual physical books here, how are newly published books acquired and introduced into the trading system? Oh. Someone, or rather someone Else, has to actually Buy them first. With like... money. eww.

Forget books, lets just skip ahead and do this with houses and cars cuz i need one of each of those. And in return for someone giving me a free house and car i'll trade you um... One Red Paper Clip, deal?

rustybrookssays...

I've been a bookmooch user for a pretty long time. It's pretty neat. Basically it's not really *free* in the sense that you have to ship books to people, so it's more like $1.00-$1.50 per book. Still much cheaper than buying even used books. I basically use it to tighten up my library, getting rid of books I don't like, and getting books I do (or books that I *might* like).


winkler1says...

I view BookMooch as a present to myself in the future. I can either
1. Impulse-buy on Amazon, pay full retail and feel like I wasted money,
2. Wishlist it on amazon and never look at it again OR
3. Put it into my Bookmooch wishlist. At some point it'll become available and I'll get it sent to me, like magic.

So it's a trick to manage the impulse-buy instinct. Of course there are these things called "libraries" too

dgandhisays...

>> ^rustybrooks:
Libraries are for communists


which is why libraries are AWESOME.

BookMooch seems a lot like craigslist, an idea implemented by a geek, who already has enough money, to solve a problem that the market does not seem to be able to solve efficiently.

winkler1says...

^ agreed.

I'm using swaptree these days, which I like even better than bookmooch. It has 3 and 4 way trades, all media types, and it's basically immediate gratification, not accruing points.

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