Actually, as with many things in my life, I didn't actually FIND Book Mooch myself. My older daughter, Farida, introduced me to it when I was lamenting being unable to find a book I was particularly interested in reading. Farida knows lots and lots about many things Internet and is always (well, most always) happy to share them with her mother. Sometimes she gets a little frustrated when she casually mentions something and suddenly I'm all over wanting to know more . . . and she's into something else. Remember pyTivo, Farida? I haven't bugged you lately, have I?
Have I piqued your interest in BookMooch yet?
Before I explain, let me ask a few questions.
- Do you have a collection of books lying around your house that you've promised yourself you'll take to the local used book store?
- Do you need to free up space on your bookshelves?
- Are you, like my daughters and me, an inveterate reader?
- Do you promise yourself that you'll make use of that wonderful local resource, the library? Me, too. I believe in supporting our libraries, but I'm lazy and really bad about monitoring book return deadlines. Besides, over the years, I've accumulated lots of books I thought I wanted to hold onto for posterity.
I love the idea of recycling books I no longer want into the hands of others across the country (and internationally). That's where BookMooch comes in. It's a way to offer your books to people you'd otherwise never meet who ask for what you want to give away. In return you have access to thousands of titles you crave. All it costs is the time to list your books, monitor your emails, take requested items to the post office and pay the postage to ship them out. I end up paying $2.38 in media-mail fees for a book that costs upwards of $8.00 if I were to buy it new. Virtually all the books I've received have been in quite acceptable condition. When a book is less than pristine, the owner can list its flaws, so the recipient knows what he's getting. I've never received a nasty surprise yet in any of the 35 items I've ordered via Book Mooch.
Go through your book shelves and pick out all those books you've read or have purchased and will never get around to. How many did you come up with? Each one you list is worth 1/10th of a point. List ten of them, and you've accumulated enough to request one book. When someone requests a book from you, you earn a point. When you ask for a book, you give up a point. (International requests are worth 2.) When you acknowledge receipt of something, you get 1/10th point, and so on. It's amazing how fast the points mount up. And you'll be surprised at the titles people order from you--things you thought you were listing just to rack up that 1/10th of a point is someone else's treasure.
As Farida warned me, you often can't find specialty books (like photography tomes) or really popular titles (like Three Cups of Tea), but what you can find is amazing, often out-of-print, and not available anywhere else except used book stores, if you have the time and energy to locate them. And they're likely to cost more than postage fees.
I requested and received all of the Vince Flynn thrillers I hadn't yet read. I discovered Sue Henry's novels of the Iditarod and have a backlog of them for my winter reading pleasure. Like daughter Nasreen, I'm fascinated with accounts of mountain climbing. Through BookMooch I discovered Facing the Extreme: One Woman's Tale of True Courage, Death-Defying Survival and Her Quest for the Summit, by Ruth Ann Kocour as well as Boukreev's The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest.
Farida constantly trades books, and she quickly realized there's quite a market for Native American studies volumes when she went through the boxes I left in the basement of the house she and Jason occupy. She asked permission to put them on BookMooch and thereby acquired quite a reference library of knitting resources in exchange.
As a result of Farida's telling me about BookMooch, I now have shelves of some thirty books that I want to read and which cost me next-to-nothing. When I finish something, I put it right back on BookMooch for someone else to enjoy. A few of them, such as the two Daniel Silva novels on my shelf, will be keepers for now. (Handy hint: if you've never heard of Daniel Silva or his Gabriel Allon thrillers, you're missing a great read. Silva is a master of intrigue and his character development is incredible. I can't start one of Silva's books unless I have a block of time at my disposal, 'cause I know I won't be able to put it down. I was led to Silva's books by a friend. Now I'm passing the favor along.)
If you know you want to acquire a book, but it's not available on BookMooch, you can put it on your WishList. When it becomes available, you'll get an email offering it to you. I've done that with Daniel Silva's latest novel, The Defector.
You're probably wondering why it occurred to me to post about BookMooch.
It's because I discovered a treasure of my own as I was writing another entry, long overdue for posting, about our journey to Pakistan 40 years ago. I'd read Caravans, by James Michener, many years ago. I'd probably discovered it even before my marriage to Abid, a Pakistani citizen, and it stirred my fascination with Afghanistan, in particular. As I composed my blog entry about that long-ago time in my life, I decided to see if just possibly BookMooch had a copy of that life-changing missive so I could reread it. They did, and I now have Caravans in hand, thanks to "Kar-bie" in Louisiana.
Since the day, 40 years ago, that I stood at the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, gazing out at the looming, snowcapped Hindu Kush, I've yearned to back. I've dreamed of being the girl in Caravans who journeyed across that wild land with her Afghan husband. With Afghanistan and Pakistan both in raging turmoil, it's not likely to happen, and I'm a bit older now, in any case. But as I reviewed those travels in my mind, I realized that I lived my own adventure of sorts way back then, a story worth the telling.Please come along over the next few weeks as I travel back in time, as I relive those Khyber Dreams. Episode 1 posts tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment