December 3rd, 2007
Buckman, true to his name, is a book fiend. Before he started BookMooch, he told me, he was “a huge used and new book buyer. At one point around y2k, I decided to buy all the ‘Best Books of the Century’ books and read through the recommendations. I ended up reading most of the New York Times’ ‘most influential books of the century’ and ordering almost all of it from Powell’s Books, and some from ABE Books. And when I decided I needed a good collection of cookbooks, I looked up two decades of James Beard Award winners, and ordered all those books used as well.”
Incapable of discarding books once he’d read them, he looked for ways to give them away and was sometimes disappointed. “When I lived in Oakland,” his online bio says, “I took a pile of new titles to my public library and they told me they had no facilities for accepting books. It was suggested that the books be left in a pile outside the front door, for people to look through and take if they want. The next day, all the books had been thrown away by the cleaning service.” He found that in other cases, books donated to hospitals for fundraising sales were destroyed if they didn’t sell immediately — the cost of warehousing them was too high.
Buckman set out to harness other readers’ enthusiasm and desire for community to form a network of active swappers. As it works today, BookMooch allows members to post both a list of the books they own and a wishlist of books they want. (The listing process uses Amazon’s database, making BookMooch an Amazon affiliate that earns a small cut of any referral sales. “Amazon is pretty happy with us at the moment,” Buckman says, since the retailer “sells $30,000 worth of books every month” to BookMooch members.) An automated system watches those lists, sending out emails when one member owns a book on another’s wishlist; the system sets up a trade with no negotiation required. The book’s owner is responsible for mailing it (which usually costs $2 to $3), and in return gets a book credit added to his account. A few other thoughtful extra details flesh out the process, but essentially that’s all there is to it.
Buckman laments the wastefulness of the book industry. “The depressing thought,” he says, “is that publishers want you to throw away a book once you have read it, simply because they only make money from new book sales. That’s a strong financial incentive for the book industry to be anti-ecological and pro-garbage-dump.”
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