Too Many Books?
I do an awful lot of reading. It’s usually done in small snatches of time, while I’m nursing, or in a waiting room somewhere, or in those few minutes of time I have between when all the kids are asleep and I give in to exhaustion myself. My husband reads a lot too, although not as fast as I do, which results in lots of arguments over who gets to read a new book first.
Over the years we’ve ended up with a ton of paperbacks around the house. More than all of our bookshelves can handle. We tried visiting used stores, trading them in for credit and finding new titles. It seems like it’s harder and harder to get out of the house and browse in a bookstore though. Our time allotment for stores pretty much gets eaten up by grocery shopping. We’ve probably abandoned hundreds of dollars of traded-in book credits at various used shops around the city, both in stores that are still operating and ones long since out of business.
A few months ago we found Paperback Book Swap. I really think this is just a fantastic idea. It could be just because I’m a complete Internet geek, and anything I can do from right here at my desk without struggling to get all the kids out the door is very cool to me. But it solves two problems for me: keeping new books on hand so when I finish one there’s another one ready to read, and keeping the mountain of books sitting around down to a manageable size.
It’s really simple how it works. You post on the site all the books you have and are finished with. Then you browse the books everyone else has posted and see what you might want. You get credits for the first batch of books you post, and from there on you get a credit for each book you send out. If someone requests your book, you print a mailing wrapper right there on the site, which tells you the postage and everything. Then you wrap up the book, put the postage on it and drop it in the mail. When that person gets the book, you get a credit to request another book for yourself. The person who has the book you want pays the postage to mail it right to you.
Another fun, geeky thing on the site is a map feature. You can see a graphic map of all the places you have mailed books, and another map of all the places where books have been mailed to you. It tracks the miles for the shortest, longest and average distance the books have traveled also.
So if you read a lot, or have tons of books sitting around, go have a look! I’ve been really impressed so far. A new sister site has just opened up also, the same general idea but for CD’s. I’m sure that will be useful for us too, my husband’s CD collection numbers in the hundreds, the high hundreds. It would be so nice to see him let some go before new stuff comes in. There just aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to listen to all the music he has around here!
