Discovery: BookMooch.com

I don't keep all the books that I read, and sometimes I take part in car boot sales or garage sales to get rid of some of them. But I'm never very successful. I end up giving a lot away to friends or to members of my face-2-face discussion group (and they give me books back too). The end result though is piles of books around the house.

So I am indebted to someone who left a comment on my blog a couple of posts ago (Bernadette) and pointed me towards Book Mooch.

Here are the details from the About page.

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.

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

No cost: there is no cost to join or use this web site: your only cost is mailing your books to others.

Points for entering books: you receive a tenth-of-a-point for every book you type into our system, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive.

World wide: You can request books from other countries, in other languages. You receive 3 points when you send a book out of your country, to help compensate you for the greater mailing cost, but it only costs the moocher 2 points to get the book.

Quite often these schemes don't work for us in the bottom half of the world, but it looks as if it might work for me. Already I have been contacted regarding books I listed last night. Admittedly both requests involve me sending a book to the US, but the person who originally pointed me towards the scheme says there are around 600 members in Australia, so I should be able to find a crime-fiction person or two, shouldn't I?