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Movies for Nothing and Books for Free

By Rachel Turner | Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I’m cheap. I’ll be the first person to admit it. I don’t buy designer clothes; I don’t stay in five-star hotels; and I don’t like paying for new books. Coming from San Francisco—a literary land o’ plenty—this was never a problem. You can’t swing a dead cat in that city without hitting a funky little used bookstore. There are even themed libraries featuring the Beats, LGBT authors, Russian lit. Every weekend some organization has a used book sale. You can get secondhand books on Amazon for a penny. Living there turned me into a certifiable, card-carrying bookworm.

Then my life changed. I took a job teaching in a small town in Japan where English-language novels are about as plentiful as burrito bars. The library does carry a few books I can read, unfortunately the stories all center around Spot and his big red ball. With a lot of unexpected free time on my hands, I quickly read through the few books I brought with me. Facing a long, lonely winter armed with no reading material, I began to panic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford the prices on Amazon Japan’s site for very long, so I had to come up with a plan to sate my voracious appetite for the written word.

A friend clued me in to the wonderful world of book-swapping websites. The premise of these sites is simple. Instead of all that commercialized buying and selling of books, give them away to other readers for free. In return, get free books. Viva la Revolución! It breaks down like this: You post books you own but no longer want into the site’s database. When someone wants one of the books you’ve posted, they request it from you. You package up the book and send it to the requestor. (Yes, you have to pay for shipping yourself.) When you do this, you get credit for the site, which you can use to request a book. The owner of that book will then ship it to you free of charge.

Many of the sites I found don’t have a great selection of books whose owners are willing to ship to Japan, but one certainly does. The mother lode in terms of book-swapping sites for international users is Bookmooch (www.bookmooch.com). With about 60,000 members and around 400,000 books listed (over 1,000 of which are from Japanese users), it’s pretty easy to find something to read. The selection isn’t just old Harlequin romances and out-of-date textbooks either. I’ve gotten current bestsellers and popular classics in recent weeks.

When requesting books from Bookmooch users, it costs one point to request from someone in your own country, and two points to request from someone overseas. You receive 1/10th of a point for listing a book, so if you list 10 books that’s a free book right there. You get one point when you ship to someone in your own country, and you get three when you ship to another country (which is a great incentive to ship worldwide). Many users also offer specials in the forum, so it’s possible to rack up on a ton of free books.

Another great swap site is TitleTrader (www.titletrader.com). The selection for international users is nothing compared to Bookmooch, but this site has a little something other book swapping sites don’t: movies! That’s right, you can trade your old Stephen King paperbacks for movies. Many different forms of media are available for trade on TitleTrader. You can still swap books, but you can also trade DVDs, VHS tapes, even CDs. The same basic rules for swapping at Bookmooch apply here. You have to pay to ship items out, but not to receive them. DVDs will usually run about two or three credits, while CDs, VHS tapes, and most books are one credit.

There are a few other book-swapping sites that cater to international users, but the ones listed above are the best of the bunch. Two other websites you might want to check out are www.whatsonmybookshelf.com and readersunited.com. So far, from what I can tell, Titletrader is the only movie-swapping site available to those of us living on this side of the Pacific.

While Bookmooch is a long way from a cozy used bookstore, it has certainly saved my sanity. I’ve been able to keep my inner bookworm fed and happy. It is also good to know that books which were just collecting dust on my shelf are going to loving new homes. I’m reading a wider variety of books now than I was in San Francisco, and I’m treating Titletrader like the video rental store my town lacks. Now if only someone would start up Boozemooch, so I could trade my paperbacks for free drinks.