BookMooch. [This title edited to fit your screen.]

Posted by me on Tuesday, the 5th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 8:20 PM, local time.

So, I don’t remember who first sent me the link to an article about BookMooch, but it was a while ago and my memory isn’t all that great. Anyway, I thought I would write a bit about it here so others can learn about it as well. As a disclaimer, I have not started using BookMooch, and I am not sure if I ever will, but that’s just me and I know a lot of other people don’t get as attached to books as badly as I do. On the other hand, I do have some duplicate copies (same editions, don’t worry) of books that I might be able to put up on BookMooch to get rid of.

But anyway, that was a horrible introductory paragraph for this piece on BookMooch. BookMooch is a community site where everybody is trying to get books that they want, and trying to get rid of books that they no longer want. Its all free, except that if you send a book to someone else, you have to pay postage fees. So really the site gets no money what-so-ever from you, it just finds you people to send books to, and finds people who you can contact to get books from, as well as providing an easy way to do that contacting. Of course you can read more about it on their site, but the idea is pretty simple.

Here is an example to illustrate (names unchanged, to protect no one):

Let’s say Darcy is done reading some books that she owns. She will probably never read them again, Andy doesn’t want to read them, I’ve already read them, and Adam is too snooty to read them. Well, she simple lists the books on BookMooch as available. Kyle, in Hawaii, is searching around on BookMooch for the next book to read, and finds one of the books Darcy listed and says, “Hey, look, that might be interesting.” So he asks Darcy to send him that book. She puts it in a lovely little mailing box from the post office, pays cheap book rate shipping charges and sends it over to Kyle. Everybody is happy: Kyle has a new book to read, and Darcy got rid of a book she no longer wanted.

There is a point system involved, where the more books you list and then actually send to people, the more points you get. And in order to get a book sent to you, you have to consume a point. So I don’t really know how well the point economy balances out in the end, but its a relatively new site, so they may make adjustments to the point system until it works out to keep people from accumulating all the books (like me) and to try and give a reasonable amount of trust that if you request a book they are going to actually send it to you. But, even if they don’t you don’t really lose much on the deal (though if you are the only person in the system actually sending books, the postage could build up… but I would recommend not sending any more books if people don’t send you the ones you had asked for).

Anyway, its an interesting little community and I think you all should go and try it out. And let me know how it goes. Maybe I can use it to my advantage somehow…

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Nice Going, Andy-san [Title edited to reduce spam]

Posted by me on Tuesday, the 28th day of March, anno domini 2006 at 9:30 PM, local time.

Ha! Take a look at whats going on in The Man Room. A quick setup by Andy and Adam of a laptop loaned from Emily with linux and a webcam to allow anyone to see whats going on in the manroom. Plans for the future include a second webcam for another angle, and maybe some sort of way for a casual web viewer to communicate with the manroom computer. Andy was mentioning that a gaim account will be on there somewhere as well sometime.

The push to get a webcam out in the manroom was spearheaded by Darcy and Amber, who would like to be able to tell whether there Andy and Adam are alive out there (The less blood spattered on the camera, the better).

I’m sure we’ll have lots of fun with the manroom computer setup now. Yet another thing to delay real woodworking projects :)

[Update (12/26/2006) : I think the title for this was optimally bad for getting spam comments. I have changed it now to eliminate the use of the j-o-b word, and we’ll see if it helps. If not, I will change it back and give up, perhaps. Oh, wait! I think I can just disable comments for this article. I’ll try that…]

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