Sweet Little BookMooch (bookmooch.com)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	bookmooch.com
Date:	03/06/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: points based, international, good website, no ads

Disadvantages: relatively few books

I will base my review on a comparison to ReadItSwapIt, as this is the most popular book-swapping site in the UK and many people will be familiar with the way it operates.

===BookMooch Operates a Point System==

BookMooch (BM) is a book-swapping site, but instead of swapping book-for-book, as it's the case with ReadItSwapIt (RISI), it's point-based.

You get 0.1 point for each book listed, 1 point for each book posted within your country and 3 points for books posted abroad. You also get 0.1 point for confirming a receipt of a book. Books requested ("mooched") within your country cost you 1 point, those mooched from abroad - 2 points.

It's also possible to give additional points to other members as well as charities.

In principle, the point system solves the biggest problem of direct book-for-book system: you don't need to like anything the requester has in order to swap, and they don't need to like anything you have in order for you to request their book. But I also have a very strong feeling that such a system is not the best one for listing all that you potentially could: you have an obligation to send books people request, at least within your country, and if you aren't getting many books yourself, you end up with a pile of pretty useless BookMooch points, wondering whether you wouldn't be better off actually taking your books to a charity shop.

It's not that simple, though, as charity shops are normally interested only in pretty pristine, newish books and a lot of the rest is likely to end up binned. You could sell them on Amazon, but less popular books can take ages and ages to sell, while the more popular ones are often "penny books" and even if sold, will cost more in postage (usually £1.85) than Amazon leaves from penny books (approximately £1.40).

So, as a tool to get rid of your books while granting them some more life, BM isn't bad. I have a feeling it actually relies more on charitable impulses and loftier feelings of members than a RISI does. I know that I have significantly less books listed on BM than on RISI - as, apart from the public-minded desire to help and grow the site, I can't see much incentive in doing so - in fact, there is a bit of a negative incentive, as you are not really supposed to reject requests from your own country (for international Mooches you can set the system to ask whether you'd be willing to post the book first).

Some people obviously manage to utilise BM better than I do, with a "mooch ratio" (number of books received in comparison to number of books given away) close to or greater than one, but I have seen many members with ratios much smaller than 1 too.


===BookMooch Has a Great Website===

The BM interface has some distinct advantages over the RSI one.

It's very easy to list books by any ISBN number, not just the new 13 digit one. BM even has a nice little tool bar thingy which allows you to "mooch" (add to your wish-list, or list in your inventory) a book from any web page that lists its 10 digit ISBN.

There is a possibility of adding the same text to all your inventory descriptions, which is useful for some purposes (I have for example mentioned that some of my books are stored in a room that people smoke in, or similar).

The pending transaction page is more complete that on RISI and when you view other members' profiles, you can see their status and complete list of transactions.

The pages are simple but clear and intuitively easy to operate. The site can be occasionally very slow, especially the searches.

===Browsing Could Be Better===

RISI has a continuous update on "newly listed books" and thus encourages random exploration. BM theoretically allows browsing by category, and has recommendations, but the categories are somehow strange, and the recommendations completely useless.

The redeeming feature is the ability to browse by country - I have got quite a few of my mooched books simply by browsing all UK books. This is, however, a kind of one-off exercise, as the list doesn't show updates or new entries, and browsing 20,000 books can become a bit of a mind-numbing task and after one browse one isn't tempted to do it again any time soon.


===BookMooch Is International===

The international character is both a blessing and a problem with BM: the blessing, obviously, because it widens the potential markets, but a problem, because it suggests that there are many more books out there for you than there really are. There are over 20,000 books listed on BM in the UK (for comparison, RISI has over 250,000), although so far in my experience members form other European countries were happy to post books to the UK too, so quite a few more should be added - but I don't know how many of the 5,000 books in Germany or 10,000 in France are in English. I received three books from abroad, two from Greece, one from Holland.

I feel that the international aspect should be somehow improved: I think a staggered system of point payments should exist at least for the Europeans, with books sent outside Europe costing (and generating) more than books posted within Europe.

All my request to countries outside Europe were (understandably) rejected, I only accepted one for a very thin book that cost less than a standard paperback in the UK to mail. All my European requests were accepted.


===Poor Little BookMooch===

But ultimately, all the aspects covered above pale into insignificance in the light of one that makes of breaks a site like that: a sheer number of volumes on offer. And here, BM fails rather miserably. As I said before, UK members have listed over 20,000 books - less than a tenth of what's available on RISI. But even more interestingly, US have less than 200,000 - still less than the total (for just UK) on RISI.

The result is a clear dearth of titles. Most popular best-sellers and airport fiction is there, yes: Dan Brown and John Grisham are well represented, but overall it's a pretty poor selection, not due to particularly bad reading habits, but simply to a small size. It's extremely rare to find a book on BM that is not available (in several copies) on RISI.

===Verdict===

Despite all my reservations about the size of the site, I like BM. It feels less competitive, somehow less mercenary and more ... sweet, I suppose, than RISI. I like the way it seems to appeal to the better side of human nature, and believe that people can be persuaded to act for a common good and not just relies on basic reciprocity. I hope it grows, because the more titles there are, the more likely it is to get to a critical mass that will ensure its success.

In fact, I am now going to go and add all titles I have listed on RISI to BM.

Summary: needs to grow