Giving and Getting With BookMooch
by
on November 25, 2007,
Are you a bookworm? Does your budget for dead trees and new ideas exceed your means? Do you have a jones for reading that rivals the national debt in expense? BookMooch is here to help.
Other services offer related services. Most notable of these is BookCrossing, combing a love of books, a need for books on a budget and scavenger hunts in one web application. What do you do if you don't have the time or inclination to go digging around a random local park bench for a book someone left there in a baggie a week earlier? Sign up for BookMooch.
BookMooch is the individual, personalized version of exchanging books online with strangers. Sure, BookMooch also offers a certain social aspect key to any Web 2.0 application these days. You can't have a Web 2.0 presence these days without friendships.
On BookMooch, you can make friends with other people who share your taste in books. You can join their forums and discuss your recent reads with other users. You can even find BookMooch on the ever popular game SecondLife, proving you can be literary and technical at the same time.
BookMooch works on a point system. You accumulate points by sharing your finished books with the world. Each time you list as book as available for mooching, you gain a tenth of a point. Once you accumulate a full point, you can mooch a book off of someone else. Each time you actually mail a book to someone, you also gain a point.
The only real cost you incur as a member of BookMooch is postage. You can restrict where your books are available for mooching to keep the cost of your postage down. When I set up my account with BookMooch I restricted myself to the United States, knowing I had limited funds for mailing books to people.
BookMooch also works with several charities. One example of BookMooch working with charities allows you to give your points to local childrens' hospitals so a sick child can have a free book. You can also give your points (which translates into free books) to local libraries and other charitable causes.
BookMooch makes money by having affiliate links from Amazon on their site. Each time you click on one of the book descriptions, you are taken to an Amazon page. If you make a purchase, BookMooch gets a small percentage of your purchase.
The BookMooch interface provides a smooth way to search for and obtain books with no fuss, no muss. It also helps you reduce clutter by getting rid fo the books piling up on the floor by your bed before they take over your space, not to mention offering you a chance to do some good for charity if your heart desires. Plus it does all of this without breaking your wallet.
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bob patterson
aa
Alan Kodzasov
Shallow
CopyrightLawSucks 
kinghajj 
Michael Fidler 
I prefer http://www.swaptree.com. Like bookmooch. But no points. Also can trade dvds, cds, and video games.
“I prefer http://www.swaptree.com. Like bookmooch. But no points. Also can trade dvds, cds, and video games.”
The beauty of bookmooch is that the points system exists to facilitate international mooches. In other words, the reason it is not simply one book given equals one credit is that by awarding extra points for people willing to send abroad, an international community of book swappers is able to exist. Without this incentive based on the points system, people from the US (mostly) and to a lesser extent from other countries simply would refuse to send books to other nations. Swaptree is a typically US-centric site. Even sites which do offer international swaps do not work as such because people are not willing to send abroad. Ask anyone from a country other than the US/Britain/Germany etc. and they’ll say the same thing about bookmooch - it’s a godsend. Extra points=reward for higher postage. Brilliantly simple really.