Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Okay, this isn't on the List: BookMooch!

After fiddling about on LibraryThing for a while, I learned about a site called BookMooch, which enables people to get rid ... uhhh ... share books from their collections that they're tired of. I haven't loaded all my books onto LibraryThing yet (it takes a while, but it's the journey, you know), but looking at the ones I put up, I couldn't imagine which ones anyone would want to mooch.
I went to the site, though and looked it over. You can't just exchange books willy-nilly. You need to create a list (which is easy to do from LibraryThing, they said). For each book you list for possible mooching, you get 1/10 of a point. You earn a full point for sending someone a book. You "spend" a point getting a book from someone else. On top of that, you need to send out at least one book for every five you receive, no matter how many points you've got.
Extra points are involved in international mooching, but you can opt out of that.
As I said, my biggest worry was not having books anyone wanted to mooch. Also, they get annoyed if you list books to mooch and then renege.
Whilst doing my LT fiddling one evening, I noticed that there was a function that connected LT and BM (sorry). I enabled it and, presto!, I could see what books were being sought by moochers. They were books in my collection! And all I had to do was click and it would be added to the moochlist on my account (which I had set up the week before but had not done anything with). I would not have to bear the rejection of my books!
I added eight books I could part with (mostly from book group reading). Monday I sent off two of them. I still had to face some rejection when one of my books wasn't pretty enough for a gift. (Some cheek to "gift" a used book!) I had two more last night.
Now my only problem is finding a book I would like to mooch. I can't think of anything off hand. I'll have to read more postings on LT, where I now get most of my book suggestions. Fortunately, we've had many of these books in the library. I'm reading A song for Nero at the moment, on an LT recommendation. It was something I would never have picked up otherwise. Perhaps we need a book-buzz thread on our website to let the patrons make their own recommendations. I bet kids/YAs would enjoy that.

No comments: