Intermission
a creative coffee break from writing the play

Last Spring, I found I did not have enough bookshelves for all my books. In fact, I did not even have room for more bookshelves. My personal library has gone through several purges over the years, and I decided to relinquish my poetry collection. It has been the least touched section of my library in a handful of years.

Less than a month ago, I found Bookmooch, a book swapping site. You list books you want to give away, and when someone asks for your book, you pay the postage to send it. For books you would like to receive, there are no additional fees for you, and the sender pays the postage.

So far, I’ve given away over twenty beautiful poetry books. In return, I’ve received about a dozen other books, which include plays, and science topics.

I still don’t have the bookshelf space. Still, Bookmooch is a lot of fun. I like that my books go to other book lovers, and I enjoy looking at individual inventories of books. A lot of fascinating stuff I don’t see in bookstores.

Bookmooch runs on a point system. You accumulate points when you list books, give them away, and give feedback. Your points are taken away when you request books. There’s even a way to donate your points to charity.

Alternate book swap sites:

• PaperBackSwap
• FrugalReader
• TitleTrader which also does DVDs, and CDs

I like the concept of trading. For quite a long time, we’ve traded CDs on LaLa. The costs to trade CDs is minimal (postage plus a small fee), and the artist gets a small bit of the money.

More recently, we discovered Peerflix, which I am ambivalent about. I have traded more DVDs than I’ve gotten in return. Often the DVDs seem to be lost in the mail, or arrive damaged. I might try TitleTrader to see if they fare better.

I’m always trying to figure out ways to avoid consuming more new stuff.

Here’s a great 20 minute video called The Story of Stuff.