Tuesday Thingers

[julesjones]

Missed last week's because day job was hectic and I was too wiped out to even read blogs, let alone compose a post. This week's prompt is:

Today's topic: Book-swapping. Do you do it? What site(s) do you use? How did you find out about them? What do you think of them? Do you use LT's book-swapping column feature for information on what to swap? Do you participate in any of the LT communities that discuss bookswapping, like the Bookmooch group for example?

I don't use the book-swapping sites, for two simple reasons. One is that "swapping" implies that books will leave my possession. This is against the natural order of things, and not to be countenanced. The other is that until recently I lived a very short walk from a large used bookshop specialising in non-fiction and genre fiction, and I could buy books in there for less than the cost of postage on the book-swapping sites.

As a direct consequence of the second reason, I'm having to budge very slightly on the first. The To Be Read pile has grown to the size of a small mountain range, and I have been told by Other Half that I am not to buy any more bookcases, and that I am not to leave the books in piles on the floor, either. Thus, I must discipline myself and make some feeble gestures in the direction of a new book into the house means an old book leaving.

Which still leaves me with no good reason to join a book-swapping site, because the only reason I'm going to be getting rid of a book is that I've just had a shopping accident and need more space on the shelf. Swapping books will not reduce the actual book population as required...

Comments

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

The only books that leave my possession are ones I wouldn't bother reading a second time and I use www.chancexchange.com in case I want something that isn't a book.

[julesjones]

I used to be "you will have to prise them from my cold dead hands", but I'm having to be realistic about my prospects of reading some of them again. Not because I don't love them, but because I've never quite recovered from the episode a few years ago when my short term memory was temporarily destroyed by medication, and I *couldn't* read for a couple of years. The memroy has come back but the reading habit hasn't. :-(

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

I've found an interesting (and, to me, 'profitable') role for book-exchange sites - distributed second-hand shopping.

The local library sale is excellent, but not entirely geared to my interests. I can go in there, buy (literally) a bagful of popular paperback fiction that I know people will want, and be reasonably confident of having most of it claimed within a couple of days. (About two thirds of what I put up comes from here; the rest is stuff I've read and decided I don't like enough to want to read again. And since I only have one room...)

Then I sit back and wait, and marvellous stuff - stuff that I would be vastly unlikely to find in my local set of second-hand shops - slowly turns up, and does so about as fast as I can read it. I make my postage cost for each book not more than £1-2 or so, which coupled with a dirt-cheap price for the stuff I give it means that it's still coming in neatly below the price you'd pay in the average decent second-hand shop.

[julesjones]

Yes, I've been fascinated by some of the stuff you dig up. Were I still a book-a-day person, I'd have probably been extremely glad to chuck some postage money your way.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

"shopping accident" - *snorts coffee out nose.* I hate those - I'm especially prone to them in bookstores. So you've got my sympathy, keed.

[julesjones]

I had one today... Made the mistake of going into the specialist remainder shop, and found the boxed set of all the James Herriot books, eight of them for ten pounds. Brand new. Since I actually have been wanting to get a couple of them that I've never read, and this was the price of two paperbacks for the full set...

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

Yeah. "Oops! I did it again!"

[fiona-glass.livejournal.com]

LOL. I'm convinced that books are plotting to take over the known universe and have developed a strange new kind of magnetism that makes them impossible to get rid of...