Swap your books at Bookmooch
By Vivek Puri | August 30th, 2006 at 11:34 pm ET
Bookmooch is a community built around sharing off used books. At Bookmooch you can give and recieve books for free. You dont need to return any books and there is no cost of joining. Bookmooch is the creation of John Buchman, who also runs the record label Magnature, and has previous experience running several other websites with his wife Jan.
Features: Users have 2 basic set of lists - Inventory, Wishlist. Any book you want to give away to others has to be added to Inventory. Books you are looking for are in the wishlist. Books from your wish list will automatically arrive to you when you have the points and/or the book becomes available in our catalog. Bookmooch also has area Pending transactions where you can find out about books you’re currently sending or receiving. You can also request and send books from/to other countries, in other languages.
Point based system:
Earn- If you enter a new book in your inventory you get tenth-of-a-point. Every time you give someone a book, you earn 1 point and 3 points when you send a book out of your country. If you acknowledge receiving a book you mooched you get tenth-of-a-point.
Spend- If you remove a book from your inventory you loose tenth-of-a-point. Every time you get a book, you loose 1 point. It costs the moocher 2 points to get the book from other countries.
Additional Rules: Users need to send out at least 1 book for every 5 you receive. Every user will have a Feedback score given by the reciever. If you keep your feedback score up, people are most likely to help you out when you ask for a book. There is also limit to number of books reported as lost in mail by a user.
Technology/UI: Bookmooch is well laid out site with a good UI. Doesn’t have any RSS feeds for any of the modules. Relies heavily against the Amazon API.
Revenue: Bookmooch hooks up with the Amazon’s book database, and if you follow an Amazon link from the site, Bookmooch receives a commission from Amazon if you buy that book instead of getting it free from BookMooch.
Overall its a great idea if it gets off the ground. One of obvious issue is, what will prevent a user to sell the books he gets from Bookmooch from selling on ebay? All the books have variable selling price, but Bookmooch gives you the same 1 point for any book. People trying to manipulate the system will try to give out low-end books and try getting those with slightly better market value and put them on ebay or Half.com. Nothing can really stop them from doing this. Another issue is from the legal side. I remember in India, every book used to have a clause stating that we cannot export the book outside country. So what happens users trying to send books from such countries.
Competitior:
Paperbackswap
on September 4th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
this is great. so useful, and legal.
on May 6th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
[…] 9. Bookmooch: I had written about this book swapping service last year. 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. There is no cost to join or use Bookmooch. You need to pay for shipping. Bookmooch makes money via Amazon’s affiliate program. […]