Give a Book. Get a Book.
Clean off your book shelves and trade in your old dust-collectors for books that you’ll actually use. BookMooch turns your old waste-of-space books into valuable pieces that can be bartered for something better.
As a member of BookMooch’s online community, you can exchange your unwanted volumes for books from other members. Becoming a BookMooch member is completely free. Once you join, you can post information about the books that you’d like to get rid of. Users then browse the site for books. If they select one of yours, you’re responsible for sending the book to them. For every book you give away, you receive one point. You can then use these points to buy a book from another BookMooch member.
Books from members within the United States cost one point, while books from members in other countries cost two points and the sender receives three points. You can browse through the BookMooch library by topic, date added, location, popularity, member name and more. If you’re looking for a specific published work, the BookMooch search engine lets you search by title, keywords and other book details. If you’re feeling generous, BookMooch also works with a number of charities that will gratefully accept any points that you want to donate to them, so that they may buy books from BookMooch.
All-in-all, BookMooch has created a clever system, but unfortunately like all community sites, there's always the possibility of a few bad apples spoiling it. BookMooch is based on an honor system. There is no way to guarantee that a member is honest prior to their membership approval. In order to protect other members from being affected by dishonest members, BookMooch assigns a feedback score to each member. After you receive your book, BookMooch asks that you return to the member’s profile and rate your experience with them. Leaving feedback scores earns you one-tenth of a point. All feedback scores are made public, so that you know what kind of a seller you’re dealing with before you decide to accept a book from them. And if the postal service should fail you, the sender will still get a point, but the receiver won’t lose a point. BookMooch tracks the number of “lost in the mail” claims each member has in order to prevent misuse.