So, I figured I should do my bit to help publicize John’s latest endeavor. You might have heard of Magnatune (if not, go check it out, Creative Commons licensed music rocks!) but you probably haven’t heard of BookMooch (yet). This is doing for book reading what magnatune has done for music listening, well, as closely as possible.
I first heard about the concept quite a while before it really happened – and I’m so glad it’s been well received so far. Effectively, BookMooch allows you to trade your unwanted books for tokens that allow you to have other books. There’s a fairness system to handle differences in international postage and a lot of people have signed up already. Including me. I’ve not got any books on offer at the moment because I’m about to ship stuff to the States – if I get time, I’ll try to offload a few unwanted ones via BM before I leave to save on shipping.
Jon.
Kat’s been using http://www.readitswapit.co.uk which seems to have worked quite well – from what I can gather, you publish a list of books you have, and then scour other people’s lists for ones you’d like. After identifying such books, you have to hope the person with the book you want, wants one of yours – if so, you swap.
Perhaps BookMooch is better, if some sort of voucher system can be worked out,as at least then you don’t get people with few/crap books being unable to get any others.
On the other hand – how do you value vouchers? Does the recipient of the book assign ‘feedback’ (like ebay) to indicate the value of the book they’ve received?
Perhaps worth investigating. Thanks!
David.