This might come in come in handy for graduate work

^ wonder what the inventory is like for those kinds of books. The moochbar bookmarklet, or bookburro make it easy to search.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Absolutely fantastic idea. I love subversive economies and alternative currencies. I wonder what other products you could apply this to? CDs are a no-brainer.

^ 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.

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?

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).

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

Libraries are for communists

*books

Adding video to channels (Books) - requested by kronosposeidon.

>> ^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.

^ 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.