So long, farewell

As I mention from time to time, I’m fairly obsessed with books. I get a lot of them from the library, but I buy even more. Some books I only want to read once, and then I’m done with them. Others I keep forever and will reread as the mood strikes me. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear which category a book will fall into, and it’s necessary to keep them around for a while to figure it out. Once I’ve decided that a book is not a keeper, I try to make its purchase pay off for me, anyway. There are a few book-swapping web sites that I belong to. The first, Paperbackswap, is the one I’ve been with the longest (over 3 years!), and I’ve had a good run over there. I joined the other two sites, SwapTree and Bookmooch, this year.

I was pretty happy with both of the newer services when I first joined them, because I got rid of a lot of books really quickly. Even paying postage on so many books didn’t discourage me. Of the three services, SwapTree was the only one where books were exchanged on a one to one basis. With the other services, people would request books from me and I would accrue credits by sending them. At some point in the future, I could use these credits to redeem books that I wanted from other users. Since the whole point of this exercise was to get rid of the books cluttering my house, I figured that I wouldn’t use SwapTree too much, but I actually did about as many trades there as I did on BookMooch.

Then, toward the end of the summer, SwapTree went through a lot of changes. It got a new CEO, and a new name, Swap.com. And just a couple of days ago, I received an email from them stating that they’re going to start charging members a fee for each transaction (on top of postage). Excuse me? Why would I pay to get rid of my books? I could take them to the library, list them on eBay, or try to sell them at a used bookstore. If I wanted to, I could have all of those books out of my house today, at no real cost to myself. I give a big BOO! to Swap, which I’m quitting (and a lot of other people seem to be, too).

This weekend, as if the universe wanted to tell me that I was heading in the right direction, I received two Paperbackswap requests. Take that, Swap!