Have a bookshelf filled with old books? These websites will help you swap them for new ones to read.
If you love books, then chances are you have many bookshelves in your house that are collecting dust. Yet the urge to buy more books tugs at your heart, and you realize that you have no more room to bring home new ones.
The websites below will solve that problem. You can either turn old books into useful things, or simply trade them up for ones that you want to read.
Book Mooch
This is a great way to exchange books. It is easy and simple. Sign up, list your books, receive requests for your books, mail out your books, earn points, and trade your points for new books. This site also offers books in Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, and Português languages.
Paper Back Swap
Similar to Book Mooch, you will need to register, list your books, receive points, and turn your points in to request for other books that you want. Membership is free, but may change as it gets more popular.
Beside books, Paper Back Swap’s sisters sites are Swap a CD and Swap a DVD.
Bookins
Sign up for free membership, create your list for trading, and select what you want. You can also include DVDs, and exchange for other playable DVDs. This is a brilliant way to get books and DVDs that you want! You can then decide to keep them or circulate them again.
Book Crossing
This is a unique book club! Sign up, and list your books using BCID numbers. Instead of mailing your books, you simply leave them at places you go. For example, you can leave a book at a coffee shop, a park bench, train station, the gym, or post office, and let destiny decides its faith.
Book Crossing is hoping to bring literacy all over the world, and it has more than four million books registered with 687,481 members.
Make Useful Things
Although cutting into a book is not my favorite thing to do, this site offers many useful things you can do with your old books. You can make a holder for your iPod, bookends, child’s flap book, table legs, clock, and lamp shade.
This is such a wonderful way to exchange old books, or make uses of them. Personally, I like Book Crossing’s idea of leaving the book for other to find. It will be interesting to track down where my books travel to.
July 2nd, 2008 at 4:18 am
Great ideas for those in US. Where I live in UK they have a bookshop for the local hospice and people donate used books and buy new ones very cheaply. When you have read them you give them back and buy more very cheap ones. It works!
July 2nd, 2008 at 8:40 am
Great article.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Hi Icy! These are great ideas, thanks so much for posting! Jan and I have hundreds of books that we could replace…now I know how!
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Thank you Louie, Valli, and Nick for your comments
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
…Hi IC, you always write articles about things
that are useful, I did not these place existed.
What a great idea to leave books for others to
take and read. Thank you very much. Enjoy your
holiday, be safre.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Wonderful ideas, great article, thank you for sharing.
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Great info, Icy. I used to have more books than I knew what to do with. I finally had to get rid of them when they were took over my house. lanne was just saying today she will have to break down and weed hers out, she will be glad to find this article. Now I lend from the library mostly leaving more space in the house for me.
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
very useful information Icy! It’s always good to give your books to people who need them after your done reading them
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:55 am
excellent article icy, thank you.
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:52 pm
useful article. very informative.
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Fabulous informative article. Thanks for the research and great tips
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:17 pm
This is great information. I love reading books and I have plenty of them.
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
These are wonderful suggestions but swapping books by mail can get expensive. You can also donate books to the library and thrift stores, give them to friends and family. I would never cut up or deface a book. I don’t like to get rid of my books but you eventually have to weed them out unless you have oodles of room.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:07 am
what an interesting and useful article, I will look into these when I need some new reading material, although I tend to get hooked on favorites, reading them many times. Another excellent article!
July 6th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Very interesting and useful article!
July 6th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Wow, I had no idea these places existed. Maybe you can do a follow up article after several months to see where your Book Crossing books made it. I’d read it out of curiosity. Great article!
July 7th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Oh boy do I have tons of old books … but I may be a little too attached to most of them to exchange them/give them away/turn them into something else – oh, the dilemma of a bookworm with little space to store all of her treasures…
-Nicki B.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
This is a good idea!
July 10th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Thanks Icy for all the great information you provided, maybe I can start to clear out some of our older books. Thanks for the the great resources you provided!
July 26th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Icy, just wanted to let you know that I found this on Trionds new toolbar. Just clicked ‘random’ and you appeared!
July 28th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I did the same as louie. The triond toolbar is cool!