One of my favorite free sites is Book Mooch. If you’re the type who’s always borrowing books from friends, checking out enormous stacks at the library, or scouring Amazon for bargains on paperbacks, then Book Mooch is about to become your best friend.
The concept: List the books you’ve got cluttering up your bookshelf. You know, the ones you thought you’d read someday, but haven’t gotten around to for the past 10 years? Type in the ISBNs (that number on the bar code) and Book Mooch will grab the cover from Amazon for you and put it in your “inventory.” These are the books people can “mooch” from you. You get 1/10 of a point for every book you add to your inventory, plus 1 point every time you mail out a book to someone (3 points if they live in another country), and once you’ve got at least 1 point, you can start mooching from others.
Why “mooch”? Because it’s FREE to get books from others! The idea is to share books, and this is generally achieved by everyone paying for postage, but not the books themselves. It’s like a worldwide network of people who like to trade books. How awesome is that?
If you want to keep your costs down, you can set your account to trade only within the U.S., and if you’re feeling generous, you can have foreign traders ask you if you’ll ship to their location before making any firm decisions.
The other excellent thing about Book Mooch is that you can create a “wishlist” of books you’ve been wanting to read, and you’ll get an automatic email sent whenever anyone lists those books in their inventory so you can jump on it.
Free books! What’s not to love?
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Tags: Book Mooch, free books, Freebies
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