Jeff’s Brain Dump

Bookmooch and MediaMail

Posted by Jeff September 23, 2006

Bookmooch is a non-commercial site to exchange used books. Every book is worth a point regardless of weight/cost. There are no transaction fees from the site, and the site peformance is very snappy. I’m going to give it a try - rack up some points by getting rid of old books.

I’ve installed the MoochBar - a bookmarklet which does a lookup on any page with an ISBN.

There’s a glut Dan of Brown books, especially Da Vinci Code. Blink from Malcolm Gladwell is the opposite - 1 copy available, 13 want it. There are 2 possibilities for this - people are holding onto their copies to 1) reread, or 2) impress visitors. I suspect #2

I’m pretty lazy when it comes to the analog world; I’ll have to work hard to be a good shipper. The preferred shipping method is Media Mail $1.59 for one pound. Shipping tips are in this thread - bookbear suggests:

• Wrap the book in plastic wrap or a clean plastic grocery bag
• Wrap printer paper with address around the book
• Tape well with transparent shipping tape - covering the entire book helps it “slide through the sorting machines better”.
• Put postage outside the tape.

Finally, the idea of MoochFests is brilliant. I’ve had this idea for several years, hope it catches on:

Q. This sounds somewhat like a peer-to-peer network (though without any copying). Do you think P2P is a useful analogy? Do you see any benefit to creating BookMooch-funded ’supernodes’ in different countries which provide a large repository of books?

A. Yes! That’s exactly right, it was inspired by Bittorrent. Instead of funded SuperNodes, I was thinking of “MoochFests” where a group of people meet physically, say at a cafe, to exchange a pile of books they’ve all decided to mooch from each other. That would be a way to avoid postage, but more importantly, meet people with similar book tastes and possibly make friends.

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