Bookmooch.com

[[deleted user]]

I jumped into Bookmooch because I had too many books that weren't moving on paperbackswap. The cool thing is that you can send internationally, which might be a bit steep in postage at first, but you get THREE points from international requestors rather than the usual 1. If your preference is for books that are within the US anyway, that's 3 books you can request domestically for every 1 that you send out internationally (including Canada). Not a bad deal!

Plus, there's no tight time frame like there is on pbswap. You can send books out in a month or more, because it takes into account that you might not be able to finance postage for a bunch of international packages all at once.

I've gotten requests for Harlequins from Canada, books that I haven't even been able to get rid of offering deals.

If you only post small trade pbs and mass market pbs, then you'll find yourself buried in points. I just started yesterday with an inventory of about 145 books and I now have 51 points!

[Mary X]

I also do Bookmooch and the no time frame thing kind of bugs me. If I requesst a book I want it soon not in 3 months. I had to cancel 2 recently because they were just sitting there. One I had requested in January. I looked at her profile and she was 6 months behind in shipping. Not cool. Also you have to mark books mailed before you send them or you could come back to find them cancelled on you. I also find that 99% of the books I look up to mooch aren't available and I only get 3 or 4 WL books a year there if that many. Altough it's only reacently that I took the time to really fill up my WL so hopefully that'll get better. The no WL limit is kind of nice.

There's also no posting guidelines so you kind of get what you get. But it is good for getting rid of slightly damaged books and those books on PBS that have a few hundred copies posted already.

I'm glad they finally made the forums better over there. Before they were down most of the time and it was really hard to make a post there.

[[deleted user]]

That's good to hear about the downsides of it. Thanks for the tip about marking mailed before actually mailing them. There are bad apples on every site, sadly.

I'm intending to use it for those books that I can't get at pbswap. I have almost zero interest in more recent books - my main interest are those books that everyone wants to get rid of. LOL

[Misfit]

I do both, but I have to say that the quality of some books I've received from BM has been rather shabby. Got one that stunk to high heaven of tobacco. And yes, some take forever to mail out. Some have their profiles marked as to when they can mail books so if I request it I know ahead of time, and that's fine with me.

[Mary X]

I think PBS and BM work well together. I get more WL books and better quality books from PBS. While I don't get many WL books from BM, I do find books there and haven't gotten any that were truly nasty.

For a long time, I was afraid to have more than a few pts built up there. Especially after that whole frugalreader thing where people lost all their pts. BM would be down for whole days and the forums were aweful. But he's made a whole lot of improvements to the site recently. Someone recently showed me how to add books to my WL without taking 5 different clicks. So I've built my WL up to a couple hundred now. That'll hopefully help me to finally get some there.

I wish they had a way to print out a lable from there without buying postage.

Another thing to consider with BM is that you aren't allowed to sell your pts. On PBS if you built up a whole lot of pts and want to recoup some postage-you can sell credits to another member. Can't do that on BM as far as I can tell. Which is another reason I keep my pts under control. But I have a huge TBR and don't want to request easy to find books just to use up pts.

[[deleted user]]

Yeah, I like that feature as well. A few of the books I wanted I was able to get from the same person to save them shipping costs.

[[deleted user]]

LOL, I got 48 books coming to me. I went wild on my PBS Reminder List.

[Mary X]

Yeah I like that feature as well. Another BM positive over PBS is that you can see if someone is inactive and report them or at least no bother ordering from them.

But that non-FIFO thing for me is a negative for the WL. The books I WL seem to never get posted on BM and yet they are on PBS. I get maybe 3 or 4 WL books a year on BM as opposed to 100 on PBS. I get so many WL books on PBS that I put my WL on hold for months at a time sometimes so I can catch up on my TBR.