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re: Followup : intl mooch ratio change
it's still a bit weird, this whole change. I took a closer look at my own mooched/given books.
I've mooched 50 books, of which 43 books are international mooches. So, If i'm not mistaken, 86 percent of the mooches I do are international mooches.
Now, if I look at the amount of books I've given. That's 31, of which 25 were sent internationally. That means 80 percent of the books I send are international. Still, I have a mooch ratio of 1.68:1. Isn't that weird?
I suck at maths, but if you look at the numbers, and not at the percentages, it seems that I'm very eager to send books internationally, which isn't reflected in my ratio. Next to that, I've got a few remarks, being from Belgium, a country the size of a peanut. - In my country, we have three official languages (Dutch, French, German), of which Dutch is my mother tongue. Now, most books that are offered in my country are French apparently, a decent amount are Dutch and just a small percentage German. Too bad I suck at reading French. - 108 people on Bookmooch are Belgians. They offer 1195 books. Half French, Half Dutch let's say. So, that's around 600 books, without making any closer into inactive accounts, books I'm not even remotely interested in. - The only other big Dutch country in the world is the Netherlands, a country where mooching isn't that popular. If i want to mooch Dutch books, I almost always mooch internationally, since I need to get my books in this other country. In the real world, that would be like a 50-minute drive. In BookMooch-land, it would kind of affect my mooch ratio in a weird way. - 135 people in The Netherlands are mooching. Weird for a country that has twice the population of Belgium. 1448 books are offered, even less than Belgium! Probably, it has to do with the small amount of Dutch books on here. the French-speaking people in Belgium have more opportunities to read books in their own language. - Now, most of you guys live in the US. A mostly monolingual country the size of an entire troop of elephants (compared to peanut Belgium). John used a kind of ecological argument that people who mooch books international that they could get in their own country is not right. But ithat doesn't really seem a valid argument from a Belgian-Holland point of view. The books I get from the Netherlands (an international mooch) can be delivered by bike if possible, whereas a book sent from NY city to San Francisco would hurt the environment a lot more. - I kind of get the feeling that I get punished (although I don't care too much about this change, I just point out the things that are weird from my point of view), because I live in a small country, because my country uses a language most other people in the world won't use, because i want to be a person with a cosmopolitical attitude (reading books in English), even though I am more than willing to send books internationally. I never asked for the system of getting 3 points for every international mooch. I just used the site. I just did what I was supposed to do. Get books out of my house, get new books in. I think the site's decline has other causes, and a lot of people seem to think likewise. the lack of new books added to inventories, the fact that people get points for just accepting a mooch, so that they can use those points virtually even if they haven't really sent out a book, the lack of U.S People sending out books internationally - which is normal, but still conflicts with the whole idea of an International book trading site. You've probably thought long and hard about this, from your U.S Point of View. Now look at Europe or every other small, non-English country. I'm an IT-journalist by the way who is about to write a review about bookmooch. I still think it's a great iniative, but it's getting less international - not just by this change. It's been going on for a longer time. For Europeans, there is no alternative. Most bookswapping sites are U.S Domestics only, and there are no local initiatives. (maybe a few very small ones, where someone trades books with himself).
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