Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Sharing and exchanging books through Internet...

I came across this article - Bittorrent for books a few days back and was mildly surprised. BookMooch.com is a brainchild of John Buckman. This interesting site works in a way which is very similar to the P2P sharing of data on the internet. But BookMooch is not about ebooks or audiobooks but about physical books. The principle is very simple - member of a book put their books for sharing and earn points and those who want the book can have it and points are deducted from them. To be able to get books you must share your own books too.
The catch is that the owner of the book must pay the postage charges to send the book to the person who requests the book. If instead of requesting a book a member of BookMooch purchases that book from amazon.com (integrated with BookMooch), BookMooch gets a certain percentage of money.
I remember during my childhood days we used to have a similar system for exchanging comics. Usually a list was prepared for all the comics that were wanted and everybody used to search for these through their contacts. Eventually a sort of comic community was built and the results were tremendous.
Another site which is slightly similar in nature is BookCrossing.com, except that rather than sharing books it urges us to donate books. You identify the books you want to donate and through the website you inform people where you'll put the book (you put this book in a public place, like a park of a cafetaria etc.).

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