Things to do with your old books

Schools Matter - An organization called “Bookmooch,” ... is a book swap club. You list the books you want to give away. Another Bookmooch member can claim one of these books. You then send the book to the person and pay the postage (media mail is now $2.47). When you do this, you get one point. You can then use this point to claim somebody’s else’s book and they pay the postage. You can thus get books you want for only the cost of postage. (You get more points for mailing to another country, and pay more points when ordering books from another country.) There is no cost to join or use Bookmooch.

And now the interesting part: Bookmooch lists charities you can donate your points to if you have some left over. Those of us Bookmooch users who have built up huge book collections always have a surplus of points. Bookmooch supplies a list of “worthy causes”: They include school libraries, classroom libraries, public libraries, and prison libraries.

Bookmooch members exchange about 2000 books a day and donate about 2% of their points to charities, about 10,000 books a year. As of a year ago, Bookmooch had about 25,000 active members. If Bookmooch had 2.5 million active members, this means that the charities would get about a million books a year, assuming that 2% of members points are donated.