My New Favorite Hobby--BookMooch

I just discovered a new distraction a few days ago, thanks to the Kirkville web site, a fantastic source for Mac information. It's a book swap site called BookMooch. I have listed more than 50 used books lying around that I am willing to send to anybody who has them on their wishlist, and I have around 65 books on my own wishlist. So far I have mailed one book to another member and have received one book. Theoretically I have two more on the way and potentially another two after that, except the owners of those two have not responded to let me know whether they intend to send them or not. The only cost incurred is the outgoing postage (in the case of a standard trade paperback it's around $1.59). So, for $1.59 I have gotten rid of a book I didn't want and received a new one I did want. How can you go wrong? Please JOIN, so there will be ever more books to be matched up.

This is a similar concept to a CD swap site called LaLa, which I also joined recently. The main difference with LaLa is that they provide prepaid mailers and charge you $1.75 per CD traded. I was able to get several CDs of albums that I had on vinyl and didn't want to pay full price to get them in digital (don't talk to me about file sharing sites--I don't do those).

Besides saving money by recycling books and CDs, I find it kind of fun in a hunter-gatherer sort of way, browsing others' wishlists and inventories and seeing what I can swap.