My bookshelf
What’s a book loving family with oodles of books to do?
We give books away to friends, family, and organizations. As members of Paperbackswap.com, we also trade books.
How it works
We list our books in the database of over five million titles. We search for Newbery winners, cookbooks, research books, and best sellers. We swap books for other books. Each time we mail a book directly to another person, we accumulate a credit that we may use to select a book from the database.
Economic benefits
The only cost to us is the media mail postage. According to our account, my family has saved over $312.62 and all of the members combined have saved over $29,000,000.
The truth
Admittedly, the swap process takes a tad bit of work. On some days, we send as many as five books to various addresses. However, the addressed mailing labels make the process a cinch. On other days, we’re delighted when we receive a book that’s been on our wish list for several months.
We love the chance to share our love of reading with others.
Comments
Heather Villa wrote on 03.15.12, 7:26am:
I've never used swap.com...but I just checked out the website. Thanks! One advantage to Paperbackswap is that all of the books are pooled together into one database and people don't need to swap a specific item for another item. So far, I’ve only used Paperbackswap. It’s advantageous to list as many books as possible, but it’s not necessary. The key is to list books that other might want. Once a member sends off a book, finding a new book is easy. Also, members may accumulate credits and aren’t required to request books right away.
Heather Villa
Seth Schneider wrote on 03.15.12, 9:24am:
The credit system that Paperbackswap uses has the advantage of allowing asynchronous trades -- I give one now, get one later. Swap does peer-to-peer trading. The limiting factor is that you have to have a match at the same time between people who want to trade. They overcome this partially by doing three-way trades: A sends a book to B that B wants, B sends a book to C that C wants, and C sends a book to A that A wants. It's more complicated but it opens up the possibility of more trades.
I'm curious to know other advantages and disadvantages to these two different approaches to swapping.
Have you tried other book swapping sites, Heather? Or have you stuck with Paperbackswap because it has worked the best for your family?
I've listed about a dozen or so books on swap.com that I want to give/receive but have only had one trade go through so far. I'm wondering whether you've had more success because you list a lot more books, because Paperbackswap has a lot more listings and users, or a combination of the two.