I recently signed up to BookMooch which is a little community site whose goal is to enable you to "give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want". You can read more about the site, its goals and activities for yourself.
Essentially you use the service as a means to advertise books that you don't want any more. People can then "mooch" them from your list, and you pop it into the post to them. Similarly you can browse books offered by others, and ask them to send their unwanted copy to you. Every time you send a book you score a point. Every time you mooch a book you spend a point. So you're encouraged to share books in order to be able to receive them.
There's a bit more to the point system which offers further rewards for being a good community member, and encourage you to advertise more books, but that's the process in a nutshell. And the process seems to work very well. For the price of postage (about £1.50) and this book I got my hands on a copy of some Borges short stories. If I'd sold the unwanted book I wouldn't have made much more than the postage (if that) so at the moment I feel I've had a good deal.
I've got dozens of unwanted books, so I'll probably make more use off the service over the coming months. Unsurprisingly the site has a basic API so there's potential for mashing up its data with other resources. I can see myself tinkering with that too.
But the site appeals to me for other reasons.
The search and browse features are fairly basic. In fact in places the user interface is pretty clunky. And yet I find the site much more fun to use and browse than Amazon. Or maybe it's because the interface is so simple, and Amazon increasingly noisy.
But then I've never really enjoyed Amazon as a browsing experience. I use it to get a specific text, but never to just browse. For that I'm still a committed user of the local bookshop. I still like to handle books and enjoy the process of discovering new titles and authors on the shelves.
Some of this is probably in-grained experience from my youth. I've always enjoyed browsing libraries, and spent many (too many) happy hours wandering the dark corners of the Leicester University library, borrowing all kinds of bizarre books.
Second-hand book shops fascinate me too. Like libraries they encourage serendipity. There are obviously times when you're looking for a cheap deal on s specific text. But the general cluttered environs of a good second-hand book shop, or the brownian motion of books on the shelves at the local library, are much more conducive to discovering new and interesting books and authors.
Amazon feels like a warehouse. I know I can get anything I want there, but more often I'm not sure what I want. I can't really be bothered clicking about the place. It's the eclectic mixture of texts in BookMooch that are prompting me to explore it more frequently. (There's also the voyeurism at looking at other people's bookshelves) For me anyway, the slightly clunky interface reinforces that sense of place I get from a bookshop or library.
Or maybe I'm just a luddite and a book fetishist.
Posted by ldodds at September 14, 2006 01:09 PM | Feedback? |