Read it - Swap it
May 14, 2007Thanks for visiting! If you like what you're reading, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
How much money do you spend a year on books? That figure should exclude any academic textbooks you might require as a student, but with the average paperback novel priced between £7 and £10 it is probably still a respectable amount - at least if you find the time to read regularly.
As I’m slowly getting ready to move to London in June, I have started a massive de-cluttering project, simply to reduce the number of boxes I will have to carry. I have looked at every single CD, DVD and book in my room and asked myself whether I will really need it. Quite unsurprisingly it wasn’t very difficult to discard all of my textbooks from last year as well as the majority of the remaining Computer Science textbooks in my shelf. The only academic textbooks I’m keeping are those that might prove useful at work.
What I’ve discovered in the process is that I had about 10 novels in my shelf that wouldn’t even sell for £0.01 on Amazon anymore - despite being in excellent condition! That’s when “Read it - Swap it” came back to mind, which is a website I had come across during the time I was revising for exams and against my usual inclination for any sort of procrastination I left it till later to explore it further.
So what is it? The website basically acts as a market place where people can swap their old books against other people’s old books. In order to participate you must sign-up and list all the books you’d be willing to swap with someone else. Anyone interested in one of your books can offer you a “swap”. When that happens, you will get an email with a link to the other person’s book list and if you come across something that might interest you, you can agree to swap (there is no obligation to…). Once a swap is agreed, both parties post the book to the other’s address and you get to read a new book while simultaneously getting rid of extra clutter in your home!
Signing up is free and all you pay for the “new” book is the postage of your “old” book, but since your swapping partner is doing the same, you’re essentially even. The library currently contains well over 100,000 books and if everyone spreads the word this number can be increased even further (*hint*)! I have certainly added all my books and within less than 24 hours had already 2 people interested in them (even though I didn’t particularly like theirs…).
Go and check it out yourself!
