I've been working with Shun Ye, an academic at the University of Maryland, for the past 2 1/2 years, helping him with his analysis of BookMooch.

Yes, it's really been that long (!) and I've kept at it because Shun has had some really interesting insights, and not shied away from the hard work of really understanding the complicated data of real books being traded by real people.

At any rate, Shun asked me to mention his Survey that he'd like moochers to take, which you can find here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NF2HY57

I'm also asking him for permission to reprint some of his analysis, that he sent me by email. I don't want to mess up his chances of getting published in a top journal, but I also want the information to be set free!

-john

Just wondering can we expect any changes on Bookmooch in the near future ? There appears to be a lot of doom & sad predictions from a vast number of members.

As it turns out, yesterday I changed the BM signup form to not ask for your personal address, as i think that spooks people who want to check us out, and BM doesn't actually need it until you try to mooch (and _then_ it gets your home address).

I'm also currently working on some "training videos" to help new users ease into the world of mooching.

So yes, I am working on things, but with a focus on "tweaking" to help new members come on board, and not so much "radical changes" as I think BookMooch, as a software program, works fairly well. Some things that people don't like, such as the metadata about books (categories, for instance) aren't easy to fix, as that comes from Amazon and their data is the source of the problem.

I don't subscribe to the "doom and gloom" outlook, but I think it's also important to face the fact that the glory days of "dead tree books" is behind us, caused by (among other things) the ascendency of eBooks and rising postal costs.

If you use alexa.com to look at other "dead tree book" web sites, you'll find that every one is down considerably. Paperbackswap, according to alexa, has lost 50% of its audience in the past 18 months. Also, the press has "moved on" and doesn't really cover this sector any more -- again, it's all about apple, amazon and ebooks.

On the other hand, I think the worst is behind us. All the statistics at http://bookmooch.com/about/stats show a peak around 2008/2009, with a healthy drop, and then a flattening of the decline so that we're now at a new steady state. For instance, look at the number of members offering books, which hit a height of 31,000 members, but has stabilized at around 19,000 members for a year now.

I will continue to improve BookMooch, but I also think that the hopes of a "big jump up" in usage and members just isn't going to happen. Back in 2010/2011 I added a large number of features, which made existing members happy, but none of those caused an influx of new members.

About 3.5 million books have been swapped on BookMooch since 2006, and yesterday, there were 672 books exchanged. That's still a quarter million books a year!

BookMooch is a lovely place for people who love real books and love trading them with other people. That isn't going to change, but we do need to realize that all of us here are a bit oddball, and not representative of the greater world.

That being said, I'd love to hear y'alls top one or two ideas for making BookMooch much better.

-john

A few days ago, I gave the keynote at a conference in Manchester, UK held by the Open Rights Group.

The slides can be viewed and downloaded as a PDF from here.

The title is "Britain under the thumb of...", and I talk about how the USA, EU and Britain itself effect issues such as privacy and piracy in the UK. I also compare the different ways in with the Open Rights Group (UK) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA -- I'm the chairman of the board) differ in their approaches, with some opinions about how each government works differently.

Last week, I visited Western England, mostly hiking and ahem, eating, in a quixotic effort to both get away from the computer and to trim down the winter fat my bathroom scale tells me has been on the increase.

The height of the tour, and reason for this blog entry, was my visit to The Eden Project, which looks like this:

Besides being a massive indoor garden, the project is interesting because it took something that no longer had any value (a eco-disaster-zone, namely a used-up clay mine) and found a way to turn it into something of great value.

Here is what the same spot looked like when the Eden Project took it over:

A spirit of trust and openness pervades the place. For instance, as you approach the gate, there is a simple sign indicating "go here if you need to buy a ticket, or else go this way if you don't" and then... nobody checks to make sure you really do have the right ticket.

The same spirit carries through to the cafeteria, where I found this sign:

next to this cornucopia of deserts:

Like BookMooch, the Eden Project is trusting people to do the right thing, which is the kind of place most people want to live in. And ... it's a massive success, with over a million people visiting each year.

It's almost 5 hours' drive from London, but really worth it!

On a slightly different-but-similar topic, I spent a day mushroom foraging with author and River Cottage celebrity John Wright:

Mushroom foraging is another one of those activities taking something that has no commercial value and turning it into something great (when you have the right knowledge and skill to know which mushrooms you can eat). Unfortunately, while I was very good at finding hidden mushrooms, I appear to also be very good at finding the inedible species. Ah well.

John Wright occasionally runs these foragings for the Summer Lodge in Dorset, where I stayed two nights so I could go on the forage.

Now I just need to find a local mushroom expert in California (Marin County) to check all my gatherings and make sure I don't poison myself!

-john

I want to write a bit about the BookMooch Journal Project, as it has been under the able leadership of Gill Tennant and has been growing strongly for some time now.

You can browse the existing journals here.

Journals are collaboratively written "books", though they vary widely, all the way from scrapbooks to wacky concepts and even prose. Here's a short description:

Participants can mooch your journal just like any other book listed on BookMooch. Each person that mooches a journal adds their entry, and within two weeks re-posts it into the BookMooch system to be mooched by another member, who adds their entry to the journal and again adds it back to BookMooch for the next moocher (adding to the inventory by its number), and so on. When the journal is completed, it is sent back to its owner.

The "about page" explains what the journals are about, and how they work:
http://bookmoochjournals.com/about/

A complete list of journals to mooch is available on this forum:
BookMooch Journals

and Gill recommends that you join this forum to keep up to date with what journals are available. You can do so by clicking here.

You'll also find that many people create a mini-conversation around a journal, on the books page, such as this journal about "Anything and Everything British"

I recently dropped a few vintage postcards of London into the Postcards of London journal.

The http://bookmoochjournals.com/ web site has been completely revamped, and new books are being created at an incredible rate. Can you believe that 16 new journals were created in just the past 7 days !?!?!?

Give it a try, as many journals take just a few minutes for you to contribute, and it's a great feeling!

-john

p.s.: Gill wrote me to add:

I need to emphasise though that all this would not be possible without the groundwork done by Alicia Edwards on setting up and financing the journal site for a good number of years.

Also I am ably assisted by 6 journallers worldwide who run individual shelves to recover stalled and lost journals which are then added to the journal library inventory for any journaller to request. They are: BMJournal Library Charity N. America Shelf (Alaska) BMJournals Library Charity Australasia Shelf BMJournal Library Charity Americas Shelf BMJournals Library Charity N. Europe bookshelf BMJournals Library Charity States Shelf BMJournal Library Charity Mediterranean and African Shelf

Also a plea that all journallers become friends of Bookmooch Journal Library Charity (which you can do by clicking here) - the local mooching and international sending means this is one charity that does not need points donated - but it helps us keep an eye on journals and provide information to new journallers and journal-creators.

I've added a tiny little feature, to fix something that's annoyed me for years.

When people mooch more than one book from you, this will now be indicated in your "Pending" page with a bold-green line that says "Book 1 of X to (person)". This will help you notice that you need to package up several books in the same box for one person.

I don't know about you, but gawd, there have been so many times when I boxed, sealed and estamped a package, only to find that the next mooch on my pending list is to the person I just packaged up.

So... sigh... either I reopen the package I just finished, and add normal stamps to the total, or I just send another package. That's no good.

Hopefully, with this small change, I (and you) won't make this mistake any more!

Let me know in the comments if I got the programming wrong and the feature misbehaves in some way.

Here's how this looks on the pending page:

Note: I posted this two weeks ago, and I'm off to England now. So.. I'm putting my USA bookmarks account on vacation and sending the UK bookmarks in a few days...

I have about 150 boxes of BookMooch bookmarks available to members in the USA or Europe: BookMooch : Box of 500 BookMooch Bookmarks

these are available for free to members who give a little.

There are 500 bookmarks in each box. If this is more than you can use, please offer your spare ones for mooching in sets of 25, 50, or 100 at a time, by adding one of these to your inventory:
http://bookmooch.com/m/s/moochmarks/-/0/50/0/-/-/-/-/-/n/-/-/-/-/

I'm also happy to send out 25 bookmarks at a time to anyone who wants them in the USA or Europe: Bookmarks : 25 Bookmooch Bookmarks

- john

In case you didn't notice, BookMooch was unavailable for two and a half days, and is now back.

My apologies for the down time!

The reason I brought BookMooch down is that a drive on the BookMooch server told the operating system that it was "failing" and would soon be completely dead. This "advance warning" is a new feature that some hard drives have called SMART and it's darned handy!

I thought I'd play it safe, as I wasn't sure what that drive was used for (the error was a bit cryptic). So, I shut BookMooch down, backed everything up, and asked my helper to buy a new drive, and copy the about-to-fail drive to it. In the process, I also figured out that the dying drive was used only for backups and archiving web site logs.

The copying of the old drive to the new one took a day and a half, and in hindsight, I shouldn't have bothered: I thought it'd be good to have the old logs and old backups. In the end, the old drive died during backup, and I just switched to the new drive, but that's why we were down for as long as we were, rather than back up on sunday.

Anyhow, for those of you who were curious what was up, that's what happened!

Thankfully, the whole episode only cost a few hours of my helper's time (I do pay him to do hardware work for me) and a new hard disk.

Those of you who give a little made it possible for the funds to be there to take care of this little problem. Thanks a mil!

-john

As mentioned two months ago, Library Conference in Puerto Rico -- BM had a booth at the International Federation of Librarians conference in Puerto Rico.

Here is what Teresa reported to me today from the show:

The IFLA Conference was a truly international event and there must have been library representatives from almost every country in the world. As usual the BookMooch booth was very popular, largely due to the amazing Moocher staff who were enthusiastic, engaging, and fun to be around. Conference attendees immediately loved the idea of BookMooch and many stopped by the booth for a second round of chats. Libraries seemed quite interested in exploring the potential for book inventory turnover and understood how the book exchange could help their process. Hopefully there will be new members from new countries joining BookMooch in the next few weeks. Could be quite interesting!

The idea is to continue our outreach efforts with Libraries, who both have needs for books, but who also have large numbers of books that they need to get rid of each year. I'd love to BookMooch to become a "sink" for those books, and if it's possible for us to help stretch those shrinking library budgets, even better.

On reason for us being at the IFLA conference is that Europe lacks an inter-library-loan system, which the US has (provided by the for profit company OCLC). When I met librarians in Luxembourg last year, there was a lot of interest in BookMooch, and I wanted to see if we could crank the interest up.

Also, IFLA was kind enough to have a "non-profit" booth rental rate. Moochers who give a little and the recent book-related ads running on BookMooch paid for the whole thing.

bio:teresa organize our presence there, and she was at the booth opposite BookMooch promoting my music business Magnatune's offering for libraries.

In EFF-related news, blog about an FBI sign in library shows the great courage and humor of librarians.

A short parenthetical comment about BookMooch in this Time magazine article:
http://business.time.com/2012/05/25/is-innovation-dead-or-doing-just-fine-thank-you/

it's a pretty snarky article entitled "is innovation dead", and the BM mention is:

(Heck, a couple of years back I got pretty enthusiastic about the book-trading social media site BookMooch, until I realized that fully participating in it would require lots of tedious trips to the post office.)

I was interviewed yesterday on BBC6 radio with Lauren Laverne.

It only lasted 5 minutes, and other than my "uhming" a bit too much, I think it turned out ok.

MP3 file of the interview

And so a big welcome to any new moochers who arrived in the past 48h thanks to Lauren Laverne!

-john

The "recent books" page is, working (mostly) well again at:
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent

I programmed it a few years ago to use Twitter to announce newly available books. That worked well for a few years, and then Twitter decided to limit the number of daily messages, even though previously I had correspondance with them where they had lifted the limits. And of course, they didn't reply to any emails I sent to Twitter asking for the new limit to be removed.

Strangely, they now have lifted that limit again, and so the Recent Books page really does contain all the recently added books http://bookmooch.com/m/recent and you can also subscribe to to it on Twitter here.

However, not everything is "hunky dory" because Twitter did turn off indexing of the #tags in BookMooch's Twitter feed, which is too bad, because it was handy to be able to filter the "Recent books" into thinks like "Show me only new romance books available in France". However, I've read that Twitter is moving away from #tags, so we might have just gotten swept up in that.

HOWEVER, Google now seems to be indexing Twitter in near real time (yay!) and you can use this fact to work around Twitter's lack of search ability.

For example, if you Google for "site:twitter.com bookmooch #rom" you will get a list of Romance books, some as recent as 2 minutes ago, that have been added to BookMooch, and indexed by Google. Cool trick, huh?

-john

About 10 years ago, I read a short story written by Bruce Sterling, which gave me the original idea behind BookMooch. In the story, people wear a watch-like gadget which suggests small gifts they can do throughout the day, at very little cost to themselves.

You can read the story online, for free here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/

Nobody keeps track of how many favors they've given or received, because everyone benefits from the system keeping track of it for them, and from receiving these little favors all the time.

This was the philosophical foundation behind BookMooch : giving away books you no longer want is a small favor, but it's wonderful to receive books you do want.

The short story book that contains this story was originally published in 1999. Here is a short review of it:

"Maneki Neko" is an upbeat, funny story that portrays a logical extension of the late, lamented "gift economy" upon which the Internet was built. The central principle was that if people contributed what they could to the system for free, everyone would wind up better off.

Thanks to infiniteletters for finding this story online in the comments to Article in The Independent. It's been 10 years since I read the story, so hopefully my memory is not too far off about the plot.

Quickly scanning the story now, I came across this very-relevant dialog:

“Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!” “Well,” Tsuyoshi said gently, “maybe my economy is better than your economy.” “Says who?” she scoffed. “Why would anyone think that?” “It’s better because we’re happier than you are. What’s wrong with acts of kindness? Everyone likes gifts. Midsummer gifts. New Years Day gifts. Year-end presents. Wedding presents. Everybody likes those.”

and the "smooch" feature was born from this idea.

My friend and author Peter Cox, who runs the Litopia Writer's Colony has been recommending to me the BlogAds Book Hive as a way for BookMooch to generate a little bit of revenue. The ads he runs are only ever promoting books, can be approved or rejected by him, and thus can remain very relevant to a book reading audience. Also nice, is that BlogAds tends to focus on small advertisers and so they tend to get a lot of self-published or small-time authors, who are trying to find an audience for their own books. I like that.

If you don't want to ever see any advertising on BookMooch, I've added a setting to your profile where you can permanently "opt out". In "your profile", toward the bottom, in the "options" section, you'll see a checkbox which reads: "do not show me any advertising". Here is a direct link to this opt-out setting.

My hope is that these ads will make a few thousand dollars a year, which could pay for things like a stand at a few conferences that look promising (such as Library Conference in Puerto Rico), and possibly other promotional ideas. Also, with the ads being solely there to promote new books, they're relevant, minimally intrusive and fit with the use of the site. Google has been calling me for years to get me to put their ads onto BookMooch, but I find their ads to be not very relevant and often crass (and I can't say no to ads I dislike) which is why you haven't (and won't) see Google ads on BookMooch.

Here is what a typical book ad looks like. They'll run to the right of the edge of the BookMooch page.

As I mention above, you can opt out of seeing any ads on BookMooch.

-john

In 3 months, I will change the cost of mooching a book internationally to be 3 points, so that the points received by the giver (3 points) are the same as the points paid by the person receiving the book.

I'm giving you 3 months' notice of this change, so that you have plenty of time to plan for it, however you like.

More info about this change:

1. this will be a 6 month test of this change, and may not be permanent. I will be closely monitoring the "vital signs" of international mooching, currency float, and other measures, to see what the positive and negative impact of this change will be.

2. The reason for this change is that the old system where an international mooch cost you 2 points, but the person received 3 points created a new point for each international mooch, thus causing inflation. In general, there are too many points on BookMooch and not enough books, so we need to adjust things to no longer create point inflation. 20% of each day's mooches are international, "printing" about 440 new points every day.

3. The old 2-points-to-mooch/3-points-to-receive is uneven, and causes problems when applied to mooch ratios. Specifically, since international mooches are supposed to be balanced with international giving (a 1:1 ratio) according to the mooch ratio, however today you receive 3 points for sending, and 2 for mooching (a 3:2 ratio), you can't actually spend all the points you receive when you're trading books internationally (the mooch ratio prevents that). That doesn't make a lot of sense, and it'd be good to correct it.

4. Why am I making intl mooching cost 3 points, instead of 2 points? The reason is that my rough survey of mailing costs is that for BM's main countries, it costs roughly 3x to 4x in real postage costs to send out of your country (Canada, France and Finland are important exceptions that I'm aware of). I thought that 2 points wouldn't provide enough incentive to send books internationally, and the general problem I see is not enough people willing to send internationally (*not* the reverse: it appears plenty of people are willing to mooch internationally).

   Here is typical comment I saw when discussing this last week on the forum:

   "Speaking from an Australian perspective, a decrease in the 3 points I get for sending internationally would force me to go 'my country only' as it is that extra point that helps make it worth my while to send internationally (which costs a significant amount from Australia)"

5. It might seem backwards, but I believe this will help international mooching. Here's why: under the old system, you only needed to send 2 books internationally to have enough points to mooch 3 books internationally. Over time, this creates a lack of incentive to send books internationally. Without enough people sending, mooching isn't possible. This change should help rebalance things.

6. This should help cause more Angel mooches, since Angels will now get even more value out of helping books get to other countries.

To reiterate:

1. this change will not occur until after April 20th

2. this change may not be permanent. I might revert to the old system after a testing period.

3. international mooches will cost 3 points, and the sender will receive 3 points.

4. Over time, this should help increase international trade

5. Domestic mooches will stay at 1 point.
   

In closing, I'd like to quote this relevant and funny comment that Nancy Gluck made a few days ago, when discussing the mooch ratio change:

The tenor of the discussion is like when they redraw election districts or devalue the national currency. Everyone hates the old system until they try to change it; then they anticipate how much they will hate the new system.

-john

In a recent blog about the Android app for BookMooch, there were a few comments asking for an iPhone app.

Here's an update on that.

A few years ago, I actually put together an iPhone app for BookMooch and was all ready to launch it, only to find that:

a) Amazon had (a few months previously) changed their terms and conditions to forbid anyone else from making a "mobile phone" app if their book data is used.

b) Amazon was sending "cease and desist" letters to iPhone apps that used amazon data. A number of apps from sites similar to BookMooch were taken down. You can google to find news of that, but here are two mentions of this Amazon legal policy: one and two.

So... I decided to create a nice mobile web site for BookMooch and not tangle with Amazon's legal department, since they appear to be serious about keeping mobile apps that use their data, at least on the iTunes iPhone store.

. . .

However, iPhone Moochers have another option!

If you don't know that you can surf BookMooch with your mobile phone, try it out!

You can either go to bookmooch.com and click the "mobile" link that will appear, or go directly to http://bookmooch.com/mobile/

Amazon doesn't seem to be enforcing their legal provisions against Google. *Perhaps* this has more to do with the enmity between Amazon and Apple, which doesn't seem to exist between Google and Amazon. So.. for now at least we can continue to have an Android BookMooch app.

-john

Over the past week, I've received a small stack of unsolicited donations to BookMooch. I've haven't done a nagging about the I Give A Little plan in quite a while, so this was a very nice surprise.

Many of you who sent in a donation also included a lovely note. I'd send you all thank you letters, but most of you who send a donation in, don't include your BM user id or an email address.

So... hopefully if you sent a donation in, you're reading this blog entry, and can accept a super-duper thank you from me.

ps: below is a sample donation letter: very, very touching, and a great example of what makes BookMooch so special for me, and hopefully for you as well!

-john

Italy has been one of the fastest growing countries using BookMooch lately.

Unfortunately for them, until today, I haven't had access to a good database of Italian books, to help them quickly enter books as well as to have access to book covers and reviews.

As of today, amazon.it is now integrated into BookMooch (they just enabled their database a few days ago), so that you can now search for books inside BookMooch using the book database from amazon.it.

Of course, you can also use BookMooch completely in italian if you visit it.bookmooch.com.

You can permanently set amazon.it as your preferred database by going to your wishlist settings

I'm really pleased to be able to offer this to our fellow moochers in Italy!

ps: be on the lookout for problems with searching for books from all the Amazon sites. I had to change a bunch of programming to support Amazon.it, as Amazon updated their "programming API" as part of rolling out their Italian site.

Here are screen pictures of me searching for a book on the italian version of BookMooch:

I have plenty of BookMooch bookmarks available for mooching. These are full color, glossy bookmarks that are a lot of fun to have in a book.

They're also really great to include in books you give to people who don't know about BookMooch.

Bookmarks are one of the most common ways people find out about BookMooch. Lots of people who use BookMooch and Paperbackswap include a book in each book they send on PBS, which is great advertising for us!

I have about 200 boxes of them in California, and another 100 or so boxes in London, so you can mooch them from the USA or the UK (if you're in Europe).

These are available for free to members who give a little.

If you mooch a large box of 500 cards, help spread them around by including a dozen with each book you send out.

If you'd prefer to just have a small amount of bookmarks, I'm also sending out envelopes of 25 bookmarks at a time to people who do not "give a little".

-john

Three months ago, I blogged and there was much discussion about changing international mooches so that they cost 3 points, and the book sender received 3 points.

At the time, I agreed to wait 3 months before making the change. It's been 3 months now, and so mooches now cost 3 points, and those 3 points go to the book sender.

Previously, an international book cost 2 points to mooch, but 3 points went to the book sender This was a policy meant to provide an incentive to international mooching, though it did have an inflationary effect. If you want to read more about the thinking behind the change, you can read about it here: http://blog.bookmooch.com/m/thread/bookmooch_blog/42

Note that this change only effects mooches from this point forward and has no impact on the past. This change also has no effect on how mooch ratios are calculated.

-john