Why? Mostly because it’s a great idea and I love books. BookMooch is a book swapping website. You post books you’d be willing to give away and then when people request them from you you send them to them. You get points for doing this and with those points you can request books you’re interested in from other people. There are other sites which do the same thing (e.g. Swaptree, PaperbackSwap, WhatsOnMyBookshelf, etc… just google book swap) I use BookMooch because it’s free to join and you can’t buy points, you only get points for giving books to other people. There is some cost to you as you’ll be paying for the postage to mail these books out. This isn’t as bad as it sounds though, considering that most of the books you’ll be sending are Mass Markets it’ll only cost you 2 or 3 dollars to send it anywhere in the U.S. Which is a deal when new MM cost between 6 and 9 dollars. I also like it because I don’t have all the room in the world, and books and bookcases take up space, space better spent being filled by things like dressers, or tables, desks, etc… With BookMooch I can get a book I want to read, and then give it away again… Wait that sounds just like my local library, which I don’t have to anything for… hmmm… Ok, well with BookMooch you have the option of keeping the book, no such luck with your local library. The only other problem with BookMooch is that the selection is pretty slim, or you’ll find the book you want but it’s in another country and the owner doesn’t ship internationally… Over-all it’s a good thing, especially if you have books laying around that you aren’t using but don’t want to throw away. Put them up someone will want them and you can exchange them for a whole new set!
Heh, we did that for a while… except a) it started costing a fortune in postage, and b) it just meant we were exchanging our piles of beat-up paperbacks for piles of *different* beat-up paperbacks. If you’re cleaning out your shelves, it’s better to just donate them to the library (or try to get cash at a used place), and if there’s something you want but don’t want to pay full price for it, Amazon Marketplace or that same used place is just as good, I think.
I’m a big Bookmooch fan myself. You can turn books that you don’t want in to books that you do want! Sure, you’re not gaining any shelf space but you’d buy all those extra books anyway!
I find it good to give away internationally, it does cost more, but you get 3 points instead of 1 and this averages out about the same price per point (that’s posting from the UK).