Skip to main content

BookMooch explosion

At the beginning of the year I changed my status on BookMooch from “ask me first” to “worldwide”. For the uninitiated this means that a step was eliminated from the process of mooching a book from me. Before, the person interested in the book would have to e-mail me and ask if I was willing to send the book to their country, and only after I had said “yes” could they mooch it. I did this because I was offering some books that were so heavy that even for 3 mooch points they were still not cost effective to send outside Europe. I always got a few mooches every month, but I also got a number of “will you send to my country” requests that came to nothing but took the book off the inventory list for a week, because if done right, asking automatically reserves the book for the asker. I think the number of “can I mooch” e-mails that never resulted in mooches was so high because many people don’t realise that the book is reserved for them when they use the “ask me” button. Once a book has been reserved, it disappears from the owner’s inventory and can only be found by
a) linking to it before asking,
b) searching for it, or
c) clicking on the link to it in the request e-mail.
Many people don’t seem to realise this and when they are unable to find the book again they think it must have been mooched while they waited for an answer from the owner.

I had grown tired of this, so I decided to go global and allow everyone to mooch directly from me, but first I removed all the heavy books from my inventory and donated them to a library. I had never had any complaints about the amount of books that were being mooched from me – there were always many enough to keep me supplied with points – but now there has been an explosion. If things continue as they have in January and February, my moochables shelf will be bare by the end of October, because it’s emptying a lot faster than I am adding books to it. In January alone, more books were mooched from me than in the previous six months. Obviously the “ask me first” status deters many people from mooching.

The mooch points I am accruing are something of a problem. I can easily find books to mooch for them all, but I don’t want to mooch too many books over a short period of time or the Icelandic customs authorities will think I’m opening a second-hand bookshop. If they do, I’ll be required to pay import tax (10%), VAT (24,5%) and a handling fee (450 kr.) for every book packet I receive, meaning I could just as well buy them from a second hand bookshop.

Comments

Dorte H said…
I sometimes think I should join something like bookmooch to get new books, but really I am so bad at letting good books go, so I don´t really know.
And who would want the bad ones? ;)
Bibliophile said…
Dorte, what you call "bad books" may be good books to someone else. In my experience, there are readers out there for all books. I have had books I expected to be mooched right away sit on my mooch shelf for years while obscure books and books I had hated when I read them were mooched hours or days after I added them to the inventory.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove