I suspect that in many countries the cost per point to send internationally is no greater than the domestic cost, in some cases less. It generally costs me $7 to $8 to send within Australia but only $5 to $6 per point to send internationally. The points system should be more clearly explained so people don't panic as soon as they see an international mooch request.

Just out of interest, according to the statistics page the number of current mooches is now down to under 10,500 compared to over 22,500 just on 2 years ago. I'm certainly finding a lot less books to mooch than I did a year or so ago. I'm seriously concerned about the future of Bookmooch if this trend continues.

Are there any BM statistics more recent than July 2011?

My goal with this forum is to have a discussion about the health of the BookMooch service.

For example, should BM's point system be modified? Do the stats point to certain healthy or unhealthy things?

One way to understand what's going on the BM economy is to look at the BookMooch stats page at
http://bookmooch.com/about/stats

You can see charts, as well as download CSV files that import easily into Excel.

I also make the entire BM database available in anonymized form at:
http://bookmooch.com/api/feeds

Some people have downloaded the data feed and come up with their own charts and analysis, such as Brett Tomlinson's recent ones:
http://sunrisecodeworks.com/BookMoochStatistics.html

You're welcome to post your thoughts here, as well as do any

-john

Brett Tomlinson did an extensive analysis and charting of BM's data, which you can read here:
http://sunrisecodeworks.com/BookMoochStatistics.html

One thing Brett did right is to only count active members in all his stats. That's the equivalent of "adjusting for inflation" and makes his numbers much more relevant.

There are six charts in particular that I find interesting. I'm reproducing them here with Brett's comments and then my comments after.

When a user adds a book to Inventory, they can add optional Condition Notes to describe the condition of the book. Not all books offered on BookMooch are in pristine condition, and many users prefer to request a book whose condition is known. Condition Notes have been provided for about 30% of the books in users' Inventories. This percentage has not changed significantly over time.

I was surprised that condition notes are supplied as often as this. My guess is that the majority of users don't supply condition notes, but that the most active, veteran moochers do, and that these veterans have larger-than-average inventories, thus bringing this percentage up.

This has diminished slightly from a high in February 2008, from about 40% to 35% of books having condition notes, but seems stable since 2009.

One of the strengths of BookMooch is the ability to trade books with people in other countries. A domestic transaction occurs when the book Giver and Recipient reside in the same country. An international transaction occurs when the book Giver and Recipient are in different countries. Presently, 80% of transactions are domestic -- 68% are US-to-US and 12% are within other countries. 20% of transactions are international. The proportion of non-US usage of BookMooch has been growing slowly over time.

I was happy to see that both International mooching (ie, mooching across borders) as well as use of BM outside of the USA are both growing.

This chart shows the (average) number of books received per active user per month. Although there has been a dip in their number, the active users continue to receive books at the same rate.

It was interesting to see that the average BM member trades 1.5 books per month and has been pretty stable at that level.

82% of books received by users come from outside BookMooch. The remaining 18% are books that have been previously-received from a BookMooch user, read, and re-sent

One of the stats I've thought about adding to each member's bio page is the amount of "regifting" they do, which I define as "giving via BM a book that you received via BM".

That's why I was interested to see that about 1 in 5 mooched books is a regifting. I do wonder how that works out in terms of demographics: if certain members do most of the regifting or it's a broad based phenomena.

I've also thought about the occasional "nag" to people who mooched a very in-demand book over (say) 6 months ago, letting them know that lots of other people want to mooch the book, and it'd be great if they read it soon and regifted it. Just an idea...

For the purposes of these statistics, a user is considered to be "Active" at a certain point in time if they have logged into BookMooch at least once in the 60 days prior to that point in time. If the user has not logged in within 60 days, they are considered to be "Inactive". The 60 day cutoff is somewhat arbitrary. At present on BookMooch, if a user stops logging in, then eventually their account will be suspended, and the user (and their Inventory of books) drops from view. But the account is still intact, and the site makes it very easy for a lapsed user to return to BookMooch and to reactivate his/her account unchanged. The chart shows a decline in active users in 2010, down 36% from its peak in September 2009. This decline is puzzling. The BookMooch site remains healthy and has received frequent incremental enhancements over time; its members are engaged and for the most part contented. External factors may be responsible. One possibility is that the drop in activity in 2010 is a (delayed) reaction to the global economic recession which occurred from late-2007 to late-2009, as fewer users could afford the postage to send books. The opposite possibility is that the recession triggered a surge in activity from late-2007 to late-2009, as people bought fewer new books and used BookMooch instead. If this is the case, then 2010 isn't so much a decline, as a reversion to prior trend, when the economy began to recover and the bubble of thrifty users subsided.

I brought this up with Mark (my admin of admins) and he thought that possibly that 2009 hump might be due to a large amount of fraud that was tried in 2009, some creating as many as 500 accounts, that the admins successfully shut down. Perhaps.

Another factor is that BM use has a seasonality to it, and we always drop way down in the fall of each year, and jump back up after the new year.

Here is a chart I made, of mooches per day (click on the chart for a full size version).

A few things I'll note about this chart:

1) you can see clear annual seasonality, with the fall of each year experiencing a 50% decrease in use, with the lowest BM use right before the New Year. Usage then spikes back up to normal levels.

2) Nonetheless, you can see a clear 15% to 20% decrease in mooches per day in 2010 (1500/day) vs 2008 and 2009 (between 1800/day and 2000/day)

So, from these charts I do think that 2008/2009 was the peak of BM usage, and that 2010 was overall slower.

However, BM is still handling about 550,000 mooches per year, which isn't too shabby.

I have some ideas for improving things a bit, that I'll be detailing in future blog posts.

-john

High postage rates in some countries makes BM to expensive for some international mooches. This is an idea that may help.

An international mooch bank could be made.
* A moocher could purchase points. Say $2 for 1point
* This money would be used to purchase a book for the users inventory
- the book would be purchased in the country of the users choice (say the US). And would never actually be sent to the international moocher.
* Moochers from the country where the book is purchased will be able to mooch this book as if it was from the international moocher.

So BM would act as a middle man making it cheaper for international moochers to obtain points.

Please point out what you do not like about this but also say if you would participate.

I think that adding a library club to BM could make more popular books available. The library club would make books available to members on the expectation that these books are going to be re-listed after reading.

Here are rules that this club could use:
1. To join the library club you would have to donate a book to the library (i.e. you list a book on the library and wait for another library member to request it). You will receive one library book ticket and a yearly* membership. The library ticket would entitle you to take one library book out from the library.
2. The library club member would then have 6 months* to then read the book and to re-list it.
2.1 If the member did not re-list the book he would not have the ability to take out more books on this ticket, but also a library fine would be issued, this could be a deduction to the time on his library membership and/or bookmooch points.

Would you be interested to be a member of such a group? I am interested to know if it would be a popular idea.

I generally think* that BM health is probably ok and that the system works. Maybe it does not work as well as hoped but this could be due to a number of factors such as being a maturing swap site (when lots of people join they add lots of books and have short wishlists, and as BM gets older there is a increasing demand for the popular books), also there is competition from newer sites and inflation.

I think adding a library club should enable more members to get access to the popular books.

* these values could be adjusted to more appropriate values as the ideas are investigated.