As part of an ongoing effort to de-clutter and simplify our house, I began to review the many books in my library to see which ones I would be willing to send on to someone or somewhere else (typically Goodwill, or perhaps a friend who I thought might enjoy it). I don’t have an exorbitant number of books on the shelves, but certainly more than I will ever read again, or that I have found influential or inspirational enough to keep around for any reason other than “books are good things.”
As part of the process, I also wanted to find some new way to pass them along. Goodwill is fine, but feels like I am giving them my problem to solve. Once upon a time, we peddled them here and there on Amazon, but the few bucks we made hardly made it worth our time, and keeping boxes of books we no longer wanted sitting around the house for months at a time seemed to defeat the purpose of getting rid of clutter.
That’s when I found BookMooch.
BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books.
BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
That about sums it up.
You post the books you’re willing to send to others. You browse the books you’d like to receive. And then everyone takes advantage of cheap media mail to send books to new owners all over the world (or just in your own country if you’re being rather cheap like I am).
If they want to read it, great. If they want to try to sell it, fine; let it clutter up their place and not mine. In exchange, I get points to mooch the books I would like to read… then lather, rinse, repeat.
Sure, it costs a few bucks to send the books to others, but then I pay nothing for others to send to me - end result: I get books I want for $2-3 each without spending hours and hours at a used book store.
Check it out.
Update: Being the father of three kids all under the age of six, I find myself tripping over a toy every other step in this house. Thus, consider me pleased to stumble upon Zwaggle… sort of a Book Mooch for kids’ toys. Of course, the only problem is that I don’t want more useless toys replacing the already useless toys, but with some selective zwaggling (if that’s a word), it could be good.