In a previous Freebie Friday post, we had lots of nice things to say about BookMooch, a site that enables users to “mooch” books from people all around the world. But you know what?

WE TAKE IT BACK.

A few bad apples are all it takes to spoil the bunch, as they say, and having recently had some extremely negative experiences with the site, we can no longer recommend them in good conscience.

See, we were under the impression that the concept of “mooching” meant that things were a little more lax than they would be at, say, an uptight corporate bookstore, where capitalism rules and the only laws are selling things faster and at bigger mark-ups. To us, the idea of “mooching” a book means that when you say you will send said book, it will happen eventually. Maybe the day you agreed to send it, if you’re heading by the post office anyway, or maybe not for a week or two later, if you’re swamped with work and don’t really have the time.

It’s a live-and-let-live attitude, trusting that strangers will do the nice things for you that they said they would (i.e. send you free books, paying for the postage out of their own pockets), all in good time. Perhaps it’s an attitude that just doesn’t suit modern America and it’s “me-first and the gimme gimmes” mentality that is becoming so pervasive.

So while some people on the site DO seem to get this, and are perfectly content with waiting a few weeks for their books, the ones that are ruining it for everyone keep on plastering our walls with nasty comments, negative feedback, and accusing us of things like international terrorism as they keep tabs on our log-ins. (BTW, who decided that allowing users to see when people are logged in is a good idea? Privacy settings ought to be variable so that users can avoid freaks like this, cus frankly, it’s nobody’s business whether we’re online or not; one more BIG reason we don’t like the site!)

We are not amused.

If BookMooch wants to be taken seriously, it should stop allowing members to narc each other out for being a little slow to send books—especially since, let’s be honest, we members are sharing books out of total kindness when we could just as well hit up Half Price Books and sell them. The “reminder” button should really only be used if you haven’t gotten your books in a month, not because you’re pissed off that you mooched them on Christmas friggin’ Day and the stranger you mooched ‘em from hasn’t had the chance to hit up a post office since they returned to their office grind on January 4th. (Today is only the 6th. Chill out.)

Ya know?

So that’s our beef with BookMooch. Take your chances if you like, but seriously? If we’re going to get this much grief over giving strangers free books, we’d rather hand them out to the awesomely literary homeless folks who haunt the downtown Austin public library than deal with these ungrateful psychos.

P.S. More tales of BookMooch suckery from the BookMooch Sucks blog and from urban nomads Païvi and Santeri. We’re not the only ones!