Book Trading

I had a great idea for a web site awhile back.  I wanted to make a site where people could trade books.  I thought about it for awhile and eventually came up with a system where you would list the books you had to trade.  The other members would search for books and if they wanted one of your book, they could request it and you had to ship it to them (cheap, media rate shipping).  In doing this, you received a "book credit".  This credit would allow you to request a book from someone else.  So for each book you shipped off to someone, you received a credit and for each book you requested from someone, you were deducted a credit.  I figured the system could be "seeded" by provided a credit or two initially when someone signed up and listed a certain number of books.

 

I got pretty excited and was ready to get to work on this idea... then I did a few quick google searches and found out that my idea already existed pretty much exactly how I envisioned it.  The primary site is called www.paperbackswap.com

 

So I recently decided to sign up and at least try it out.  I immediately uploaded my 10 books to get 2 free credits.  Surprisingly, 7 of the books I uploaded were immediately snatched up.  Apparently you can search for books not listed on their web site and add them to your wish list.  Then you can setup the books on your wish list to automatically request the book as soon as anyone lists it.

 

I immediately realized that this site is probably loaded with not-so-great books with many more people requesting good books than providing good books.  It's too soon to draw hard conclusions, but I will continue to evaluate.  As for now, I have wrapped up 7 books to ship off.  This will give me 9 credits, so I will have to spend some time loading up my wish list to automatically request the books I'm interested in.  Hopefully some decent books show up within a reasonable timeframe. 

 

Tip from Dan:  If you are signing up for this site and listing book for the first time, don't list any books that may belong to your spouse.  If this book happens to be on someone's wish list it will automatically get requested and you will not have the option to easily remove it from your list - then your spouse will realize you 'gave away' her precious book and demand that it be replaced for an outrageous price on Amazon.com, thus defeating the entire purpose of the book swap concept.