Get Swapping–Books, That is

If you’re dying to get rid of your old English lit novels, or if you find your boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books gathering dust in the corner of your room, then boy, have I got the places for you.

What if you could find someone on the Web who wanted your old books, but you wouldn’t have to go through all the trouble of finding that person yourself? What if you could also search the Web for almost any book you wanted and get it for free? Pretty cool, right?

Well, swapping books is all the rage nowadays, and there are a multitude of book-swapping sites to prove it. Most are free to join and score you on a point system. For listing a book on the site, you get some fraction of a point. For actually giving a book away (that is, putting it in an envelope and slapping on the postage to send it), you get a full point. And for every full point you earn, you get a free book of your choice.

Here’s a smattering of what’s out there:

PaperBackSwap lets you search over a million available books and print out postage for each book you send. They warn that they may start charging in the future, but right now the service is free. BookIns is a similar site, but prides itself on great customer service and tracks the shipment of every book its customers send.

BookMooch follows the same basic idea as the other services but has a few additional cool features: it lets you build a wish list of books, put in requests for foreign language books, and donate books to charitable causes.

TitleTrader allows you to swap music and movies as well as books, and makes it easy for you to enter items you want to swap by typing in ISBN numbers only.

So, what are you waiting for? Get swapping!