A few months later I was reading my Earthlink Newsletter and found a review of another book trading website

Logo artwork courtesy of BookMooch.com

What can I say about Bookmooch... There's good things and there's bad things. Let's start with the good.

Bookmooch allows you to post Condition Notes with your books, so if a particular book is in bad shape you can let potential 'moochers' know that. You can even use the feature to offer discounts like 2 for 1 (though that can be confusing).

You earn bonus points for adding books to your inventory and marking books received - 1/10th point for each. So by just adding 10 books to your inventory you get a free book (domestic). And for every 10 books you mark received you get another free book.

Bookmooch is an International site - you can get books from all over the world. Just because someone in the United States (or whatever country you happen to live in) doesn't have the book you want, maybe you can get it from England, or Poland, or Iceland, or... Anywhere! If your inventory has a bunch of books that are common in your country... How many copies of it are available in China, Switzerland, or Belgium?

Caveat: It costs 2 points to mooch a book from another country, but you earn 3 for sending to another country. While sometimes sending books to other countries is well worth the extra points occasionally the difference in postage is so drastic that it could break your budget to send just one book. Fortunately you can set your account to either send books only within your own country or "Ask First", which allows you to consider each International request on a case by case basis. I follow a simple rule: If it would cost less (or about the same as) 3 times the price of sending a book within the US, I'll send it.

Now for the bad...

The website itself is problematic. There are regular issues with it going down - occasionally for days at a time.

The search function is pretty iffy. You might not even find books that are in your own inventory using the site's search engine. I generally find that it's easier to research books on other sites, then look for specific books by ISBN at Bookmooch.

There are a number of features that either don't work right or aren't implemented in a way that makes them useful.

Those bonus points you can earn I mentioned earlier? They make it really easy for scammers to set up accounts and earn points by listing books they don't have - thereby allowing them to take books without ever giving any (How Rude!). On the upside, at least you don't lose points if you do get scammed.

The Wishlist system leaves a lot to be desired. If a book is on more than one person's Wishlist they have a complicated system that tries to give everyone a fair chance to grab it, but it falls far short of many user's expectations. There have been a number of suggestions to change the Wishlist system (like to a simple first ask, first reserve queue), but there are no plans to any of the ideas in the near future. The current system is at least better than the original one (everyone is notified and 'he who grabs first' gets it).

Overall, I consider Bookmooch a work in progress and don't recommend it to 'newbie' book traders right now, mainly due to the site's instability. But it's slowly getting there. They've even come up with this neato Widget for your webpage

Swap books at BookMooch.com

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