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Keynote Speech at Open Rights Group conference in Manchester, UK

John Buckman — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 11:09:09 GMT

Keynote Speech at Open Rights Group conference in Manchester, UK

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.

John Buckman
1 month ago

Academic survey for BM

John Buckman — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:15:15 GMT

Academic survey for BM

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

update: Shun said he'd be happy to share some insights with the BM community, but wants to hold off for now, lest it taint the survey results, which are being used to verify the preliminary results.

John Buckman
1 month ago

Doom & gloom?

John Buckman — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:56:16 GMT

Doom & gloom?

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

John Buckman
3 months, 17 days ago

Book 1 of 2... new feature on Pending page

John Buckman — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:20:16 GMT

Book 1 of 2... new feature on Pending page

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:

John Buckman
7 months, 16 days ago

Bookmarks available in USA and Europe

BookMooch Bookmarks — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:04:13 GMT

Bookmarks available in USA and Europe

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

BookMooch Bookmarks
7 months, 22 days ago

Time Magazine mentions BM

John Buckman — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:45:03 GMT

Time Magazine mentions BM

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.)

John Buckman
12 months, 5 days ago

BBC6 radio interview

John Buckman — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:11:19 GMT

BBC6 radio interview

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

John Buckman
12 months, 13 days ago

Twitter being nicer to BM for now...

John Buckman — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:53:35 GMT

Twitter being nicer to BM for now...

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

John Buckman
12 months, 23 days ago

BM Journal Project going strong

John Buckman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 01:39:59 GMT

BM Journal Project going strong

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.

John Buckman
1 year ago

Sorry for the interruption!

John Buckman — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:31:23 GMT

Sorry for the interruption!

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

Unexpected Donations to BM

John Buckman — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:01:28 GMT

Unexpected Donations to BM

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

Bookmarks available in USA, UK and Europe

BookMooch Bookmarks — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:54:11 GMT

Bookmarks available in USA, UK and Europe

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

BookMooch Bookmarks
1 year ago

Honest garden

John Buckman — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:09:21 GMT

Honest garden

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

BM was unavailable

John Buckman — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 04:20:37 GMT

BM was unavailable

Update on Friday

I replied to a few of the questions below:
click here to read my replies

Update on Monday

My apologies for the delay in getting BookMooch working reliably.

I've been working on trying to figure out what was going on, as the problem is elusive. It now looks like perhaps the "ethernet" network card has become unreliable and that's been swapped out for a new one. BM was running fine for a few hours yesterday, and then it disappeared from the Internet, but everything else looked fine.

Hopefully I've got the problem nailed down now, but computers being what they are, odds are that I'm deluding myself and there are still gremlins in the system. Let's hope there aren't!

If BM becomes unavailable again in the next few hours, don't panic, it's just some annoying technical problem that I'll eventually figure out!

-john

BookMooch was unavailable for about 30 hours.

The problem was caused by the operating system going "splat" for reasons I haven't yet figured out.

So... I had to reinstall the operating system and reconfigure the machine to run BookMooch.

Everything looks like it's working fine, and there was no data loss.

If you do see something not working right, please post a comment below and I'll get on it right away.

UPDATE

The new operating system isn't working reliably yet, so BM was working fine for 6h, then choked. I think it's just something that's different with the new operating system version, and so the next 24h of BookMooch might continue to have problems as I try various ideas to fix the unreliability.

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

Added Spanish book data

John Buckman — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 07:02:05 GMT

Added Spanish book data

Today, I added support for "Amazon.es", which is a large database of Spanish language books.

When you browse for books, you can choose "amazon.es" in your search, and (mostly) only spanish language books should be found (ie, only books old at Amazon's store for Spain).

This improvement will make it much easier for those of you entering Spanish language books to give away, because all you'll need to do is find the book with a search, rather than having to enter in all the book details.

I also added a "Preferred Amazon store" choice on the bottom of your profile page, so that links to more information (ie the "Amazon" buttons on the book pages) go to the appropriate store for your country.

Where (for instance) a Spanish language book might have been added in the USA, you might be in Spain and prefer to read the user's comments on Amazon.es

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

No iPhone BM app will happen

John Buckman — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 06:44:25 GMT

No iPhone BM app will happen

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

Android App for BM

John Buckman — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:23:26 GMT

Android App for BM

Ika Bar-Menachem has written a very nice app for using BookMooch from your Android phone.

It is now available in the Android market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ikabar.app.bookmooch

Ika has done a great job adding all the basic features you need to use BookMooch. You can add books to your inventory (useful if your books are elsewhere in your house) but you can also easily add books to your wishlist (if a friend tells you of a great book over lunch).

He's also added a bar code scanning feature, so you can simply point your Android phone at the bar code on the back of the book, and the book is automatically found for you.

Ika is asking for a very nominal fee of $0.99 for the app, which he's put a huge amount of effort into.

Here are some pictures of the app, when I was using it this morning. There are more photos on its Android marketplace page.

John Buckman
1 year ago

International Library Conference

John Buckman — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 11:04:31 GMT

International Library Conference

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.

John Buckman
1 year ago

Scifi story that birthed BookMooch

John Buckman — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:00:22 GMT

Scifi story that birthed BookMooch

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?

Its better because were happier than you are. Whats 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.

John Buckman
1 year ago

Article in The Independent

John Buckman — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:08:02 GMT

Article in The Independent

The Independent newspaper in the UK ran an article about me today.

You can read it on the link above, or read the PDF or from this text here:

John Buckman: The battle to keep the internet free for all
The Business Interview: His entrepreneurial skills are put to good use in the battle to defend his vision of the web

By Stephen Foley
Thursday, 11 August 2011

John Buckman hands his fold-up bicycle to the ma�tre d', scans the menu, gently rebuffs the sommelier's suggestion of English sparkling wine ("You can't even cook with it") and settles in for a philosophical chat.

The British-born, US and French-educated head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a man without borders, who splits his time between London and Silicon Valley, running two businesses, indulging his passions for the arts, and campaigning for freedom on the internet.

When The Independent caught up with him in the UK, he was alive with tales of a recent "soir�e" at his London home, a regular event he holds in the style of a French salon. He had invited a shakuhachi player to entertain the guests, if entertain is the precise word, since the didgeridoo-style Japanese flute is more of a personal meditative tool than a performance instrument. "It's the one performance where it is perfectly acceptable to fall asleep," he says.

One of Mr Buckman's businesses is Magnatune, a distributor of world and classical music and defunct styles of Eighties electronica, by artists who have found no place in the modern factories of iTunes and cost-cutting record-label giants. Unlike traditional labels, Magnatune lets the artists keep the rights to their work. "I make about three months' rent for 4,000 musicians, and that's my contribution right now," he explains.

Mr Buckman's other venture is BookMooch, whose 250,000 members swap second-hand books amongst themselves. "It was inspired by a Bruce Sterling science-fiction story, where everyone had a watch on them that kept track of what they were doing and suggested favours they could do for others at no cost to themselves, through an invisible co-operative net."

This pair of ventures, like his soir�es, speak to Mr Buckman's belief that the world is at its best when people collaborate, share and create, and where the internet is the most powerful force for achieving these goals. It is a vision of the web that is under constant threat from corporations that aggressively enforce "all rights reserved" copyright, and from governments and courts who spend too much time snooping on what people do online.

Which is why he joined the EFF, and the board of the Open Rights Group, a similar UK-based campaign group. "I am not actually a very political person," he says, "but I find there is a British person in me, saying: 'That's not on.'"

The EFF was founded 21 years ago in an early wave of public and corporate concern about computer hackers, to defend computer programmers and entrepreneurs caught up in the US authorities' campaign against cyber-crime. Some of its first funding came from the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. It still advises hackers these days not the "black hat" types out to steal people's credit-card details, but the kids and hobbyists who risk falling foul of intellectual property laws when they tinker with other people's source codes or hardware and it goes into battle to shape copyright and free-speech laws through the US court system.

It took on the Texan telecoms giant AT&T which was revealed to have secretly aided the security services by allowing them access to phone records and to wiretap customers in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, a case that was stopped only when Congress retrospectively legitimised the assistance. In the UK, the EFF is campaigning against new laws to block websites suspected of aiding music and film piracy, and last week it welcomed the Government's climbdown from provisions of the Digital Economy Act that would have forced internet service providers to do so.

"Instead of trying to get laws passed or repealed, we try to get case law we like," Mr Buckman says. "Judges are much more reasonable people than politicians. They listen to arguments and they are supposed to make a decision based on what everyone heard, not on a back-room deal. But when you consider we are 50 people working on the entire body of US law against every company that wants to push things too far, that is not many people."

For many companies, particularly music and media businesses, the EFF's lines are hard to swallow. But the bottom line, according to its chairman, is this: the internet is new, the laws governing it are new, and it is important to carve out as much protection for free speech and freedom of activity as possible. Laws that might seem to be aimed only at child pornographers or music pirates might one day be used to infringe basic human rights and to censor the web in egregious ways.

"One of the most interesting things that WikiLeaks has taught is that your best defence against the government is putting your words out on dead trees. If you are purely digital, you don't have seem to have anywhere near as strong a legal defence. A huge amount of our effort goes into building up case law to show that journalism online should have all the same legal protections. And by journalism we mean a very broad definition of journalism that includes bloggers and citizen journalists. Essentially anyone who writes on the internet engages in journalism, and we think should be protected."

The EFF under Mr Buckman is carving out an influential niche in the world of advocacy, on as its name suggests the frontier of technical and business innovation. There are running battles to come between those who envision a sometimes anarchic, always collaborative, internet where people freely share, adapt and build new ventures, and those who want to impose order and restore the primacy of intellectual property over those who would steal it. The polymath has chosen his side, and Mr Buckman is clear about why.

"London is a screaming example of the success that openness leads to," he says, before cycling off into the Central London traffic. "In the European Union now, every talented person who leaves school spends a couple of years in London. It's the new British empire. Where before we had bureaucrats all over the world, now we have Anglophiles."

Buckman in brief

Campaigner Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2010; director of the Open Rights Group.

Entrepreneur Currently chief executive of BookMooch, a book-swap service, and Magnatune, an artist-friendly record label. Previously founded Lyris, a direct-marketing firm. "At one point George Bush used my software to send out all his emails in his re-election campaign. To do penance I gave a free copy to the Howard Dean campaign."

World traveller Born in London and raised in France and the US, his family moved around with his father's job as an executive for Singer sewing machines. Studied philosophy at Bates College in Maine and the Sorbonne.

Musician Renaissance lute and viola da gamba player, and a composer of jazz and classical jingles for radio.

John Buckman
1 year ago

BM Birthday today: 5 years!

John Buckman — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 10:28:10 GMT

BM Birthday today: 5 years!

Five years ago, on August 7, 2006, BookMooch came into this world!

As of today, over three million books have been swapped (3,010,523 to be exact) on BookMooch!

A big thanks to all my fellow moochers for making this crazy idea work.

BM originally took 18 months to write, from an idea I had in 2004. I was a bit depressed at the time about my corporate job, and wanted to work on something I felt really positive about, which is how BookMooch was born. Wow, it's turned out well!

Also, a million thanks to Mark and the other volunteer admins, who do everything from answer tech support to mediate disputes. Without them, the site wouldn't work anywhere as well, nor have as positive a culture it has, and I wouldn't have any time to do any programming!

If you'd like to express your love for BookMooch, can I encourage you to "give a little" at http://bookmooch.com/m/give_a_little

Even a teeny donation of $3 per month really helps, since BM is totally volunteer based. My time is donated, as are all the admins, and other volunteers as well (such as at trade shows) -- nobody gets paid for helping run BM. A little bit of money get stretched a looong way.

And thanks again to all the moochers world-wide for making mooching so much fun, and such a great way to live!

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

Chinese books now available

John Buckman — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:03:54 GMT

Chinese books now available

While China has never been a big source of moochers, there are plenty of Chinese readers in America and Europe, so I've wanted to see if I could do something to help chinese books be swapped on BookMooch.

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

As of today, amazon.cn 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.cn.

Note that there is no all-Chinese version of the BookMooch web site exists at this time : you'll need to use it in English (or one of the other languages we do have)

Also note that searching for books with Chinese characters doesn't work that reliably on BookMooch. I'm sorry about that, it's a tech problem I need to look into, but it's a hard problem to solve.

For now, if you want to search for Chinese books, you're best off using amazon.cn and clicking on the moochbar when you find the book you're looking for.

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

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 Chinese site.

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

Italian Books now available

John Buckman — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 11:52:31 GMT

Italian Books now available

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!

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

John Buckman
1 year ago

Bookmarks available in USA and UK

BookMooch Bookmarks — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:06:55 GMT

Bookmarks available in USA and UK

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.

I was having a chat with main BookMooch admin Mark last week, and he said that the bookmarks are the #2 most common way 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.

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.

-john

BookMooch Bookmarks
1 year ago

Twitter and recent books

John Buckman — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:43:12 GMT

Twitter and recent books

Many of you know abut the recent books page, which provides an up-to-the-second list of books being offered on BookMooch.

That page works by plugging into Twitter, so you can view the feed from either BookMooch or from Twitter.

There used to be a helpful feature provided by twitter, that you could search for #tags inside our feed. For some reason (possibly because of the quantity of BM's tweets), Twitter no longer finds anything for #tags inside the BookMooch feed.

I've sent Twitter a tech support request, to see I can get them to re-instate the #tag searching feature that used to work for us. However, I haven't received any response.

So... for the time being I removed the country and genre searching features in "recent books" as they haven't been working for some time, since Twitter disabled this.

As an aside, I did discover that it's possible to get an RSS feed of BM's recent books, by using this RSS URL : http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/85174314.rss

If your RSS program supports searching, you could use this to see the subset of recent books you're interested in.

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

New 'Forgot your password' feature

John Buckman — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:26:25 GMT

New 'Forgot your password' feature

I've changed what BookMooch does when you forget your password.

Previously, it was possible to try and try and try again, to type an endless number of password attempts, until you finally got it right.

As of today, if you get can't enter your password correctly after 4 attempts, you're redirected to a page that looks like this:

the reasons for this change are:

1) to help people get their password to them, if they've forgotten it

2) to give people common advice about why they can't get into the account (ie, the CAPS LOCK key is on)

3) to prevent someone malicious from trying millions of common passwords until they find one that works.

I've been following the story of the hacked passwords from Sony, and how the most common password is "Seinfeld."

Until today, you theoretically could have written a program to try millions of common passwords against BookMooch accounts, and I'm sure that if you tried hard enough, you'd find lots of BookMooch accounts that use common passwords.

Now, before you worry, we've never, ever had a report of anyone doing this, nor of anyone stealing someone else's account.

Also, I watch the BookMooch server pretty closely, so I would have noticed that something was up.

However, I thought it would be wise to play it safe, and put a mechanism in place to prevent this sort of thing for the future.

Note that if you mistype your password 4 times, your account is automatically locked for one hour, though you can immediately unlock it if you fill out the "robot detection" form that's presented to you (ie, in the picture above).

Anyhow, this shouldn't effect most of you, it's just something I've been meaning to do for a while.

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

Ads are here

John Buckman — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:46:18 GMT

Ads are here

After two months of no interest from advertisers, suddenly BookMooch is quite popular with them, with four ads submitted to me this week.

However, with success sometimes comes trouble. One of the advertisers, under the guise of a free Starbucks gift card, was actually trying to get people to sign up for a $9.99 recurring charge on their mobile phone. Apparently a few people got caught by this, and complained to the admins. I'm really sorry about that, and suspended the ad as soon as I heard about it. It ran for a day and a half before being halted. It was my birthday yesterday (42!) and I was (unusually) out all day having fun, which is why the ads didn't get halted within a half day.

Thankfully, unlike with Google advertising, I have the ability to remove any ads with the advertising company I use. I also get same-day rejection rights on ads before they appear on BookMooch. Unfortunately, while I had reviewed the Starbucks ad, I didn't see anything shady with it, and so I let it through -- apparently the shadiness came after the initial signup page. I'm going to be more careful now.

There are three ads currently in rotation, and all look much more like the kind of thing we want on BookMooch. One ad is for a new book from Macmillian, another for a new book from Random House.

Great!

The feedback from my original blog entry "BookMooch Blog" about accepting ads was that people were quite positive about book related ads, and so I'm quite happy to *finally* be getting ads for new books.

The other ad in rotation today is from http://www.50summersteals.com/ which *appears* to me to be legit. However, there's only so much I can tell by looking at a page, so please, if you think that an ad on BookMooch is shady, please email tech support http://bookmooch.com/m/email_support and voice your concern. I have the ability to "pause" an ad while we investigate, which is what I'd do if any ad needs scrutiny from us.

On the positive side, this week's advertising raises $1371 for BookMooch, which goes a long way to paying for the $2000 booth we rented at the American Library Association conference last week.

If you find the ads annoying, you can opt-out of them with a setting at the bottom of your profile:
http://bookmooch.com/m/profile

A few people have complained that the ads appeared again for them even though they opted out. I haven't been able to cause that to happen in my own testing, except if I leave the member section (http://bookmooch.com/m/) and go to the non-member section (without the /m/ on the url), in which case you have left the member area, where BM shows ads all the time. If you do not want to see ads, first opt out of them, and then be sure that you're in the member section (where every page starts with bookmooch.com/m/)

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

ALA Trip Report

John Buckman — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:31:13 GMT

ALA Trip Report

Teresa just came back from the American Library Association meeting in New Orleans, and sent me a bunch of photos and notes of the BookMooch booth there.

She writes:

Attached are some photos from the BookMooch exhibit booth, which turned out to be quite popular and enjoyed a nice flow of traffic with over 11,000 attendees at the conference and exhibition.
A number of Moochers stopped by to say hello, libraries really liked the idea of inventory exchange, and people indicated they would join for themselves as well. In this area schools, libraries and the public have all been faced with restocking their book inventories, many of which were completely destroyed in Katrina. It's a big issue in the region and BookMooch was seen as very positive way to help.
The booth volunteers were simply amazing and did a fantastic, enthusiastic job talking with the public and conference participants. It really was the fun booth to visit. Several generous volunteers came for more than one day (an extra perk: it didn't hurt that advanced copy books by favorite authors were the event party favors!). btw Andrice's artwork continues to draw folks to the booth, everyone just loves it.

This was a great event for BookMooch!

John Buckman
1 year ago

At American Library Conference

John Buckman — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 08:35:10 GMT

At American Library Conference

BookMooch is now confirmed as having a stand at the annual American Library Association occurring in just 9 days, taking place in New Orleans.

As you can see on the ALA web site:
http://connect.ala.org/node/143485

we will be located at booth number 1652.

Teresa, who works with me both on BookMooch and on Magnatune (a small music subscription service I run that also provides music to libraries), will be at the show, along with a host of volunteers. Magnatune is paying to fly Teresa out to the show, as Magnatune will have a stand near the BookMooch stand.

If you'd like to volunteer, or are simply planning on going to the ALA conference and would like to meet other moochers, you might want to join the forum created for this conference and indicate that you're attending.

[forum:ala_conference_in_new_orleans]

-john

ps: BookMooch (and Teresa) will also be at the International Library Association (IFLA) conference, held this August in Puerto Rico.

John Buckman
1 year ago

New Orleans Library Conference

John Buckman — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 13:07:27 GMT

New Orleans Library Conference

BookMooch is exhibiting at the American Library Association (ALA) Conference from June 24-27 in New Orleans.

We need volunteers to help out at the booth.

My hope is to interest libraries to participating in BookMooch.

I know that some libraries are already on BookMooch, giving away the books they would normally discard so that they can earn points and avoid buying books they could instead get from BookMooch.

One Library wrote me that they were saving 20% on their total annual book buying budget by using BookMooch. That's pretty significant.

There may be other ways that BookMooch can work with Libraries, and the best way to learn is for us to show up and have lots of conversations with librarians.

The event has a schedule of exciting speakers and the exhibit hall alone will be a Moocher's delight. More about the conference can be found at http://www.alaannual.org.

BookMooch will be in the exhibiting all four days (at the fun booth) and any volunteers who would like to attend this event & help staff the table are very welcome and appreciated.

If you are interested, need more details, or have any questions please go over to the forum discussing this conference: [forum:ala_conference_in_new_orleans]

You can email Teresa either on our forum or directly

ps: the cost of exhibiting at the show is paid for by the "give a little" donations. I'm hoping that book-related advertising might pay for these things in the future, but so far we've only had one ad, which netted BM $40.

-john

John Buckman
1 year ago

Book ads coming

John Buckman — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:04:29 GMT

Book ads coming

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

John Buckman
2 years ago

Library Conference in Puerto Rico

John Buckman — Mon, 09 May 2011 00:59:14 GMT

Library Conference in Puerto Rico

The annual world conference of libraries is being held this August in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

I've long thought about having a stand at their annual conference, as some libraries currently use BM both to supplement their catalogs, and to find a good home for books they are discarding. In many ways, BookMooch is a network of home libraries doing a kind of inter-library loan.

However, I can't rationalize charging BM for the cost of flying two people from California to Puerto Rico, as well as the accommodation costs.

So... I was wondering if there were any Moochers in Puerto Rico who might be interested in working a BookMooch stand at this conference?

If so, BM could have a presence at this conference, and try to recruit more libraries into the joys of mooching. The conference has a 80% discounted rate (�1,000) for non-profits, which BM can afford (thanks to those of you who "give a little")

The idea would be to explain BookMooch to librarians and talk to them about how they could work with the BM network to stretch their book-buying budgets, and get more value out of their discarded books.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

4h outage

John Buckman — Fri, 06 May 2011 06:28:57 GMT

4h outage

There was a power outage at the server hosting company where BookMooch's server lives, and consequently BookMooch was unavailable for four hours today.

No data was lost, everything is fine, but I thought I'd let you know in case you were worried.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

International mooches now 3 points

John Buckman — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:49:44 GMT

International mooches now 3 points

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

John Buckman
2 years ago

re: A dangerous idea

John Buckman — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 04:43:54 GMT

re: A dangerous idea

Thanks everyone for the friendly tone and civility in discussing my blog entry A dangerous idea

I was trying to be a bit of a devil's advocate and not let people know what my current opinion of the idea was, so that it'd get as positive a presentation and listening as possible.

That being said, this comment pretty much summarizes my feeling about the dangerous idea:

This idea does not seem to fit in with Bookmooch overall, and reduces the majority who would not join into second-class citizens, without much benefit overall.
I can see how Albiris would like this, but see it benfiting them much more than Bookmooch members. They sometimes have the lowest price, but much more often are beat out by Amazon and the rest. You have to check all the sites to find the best price, not just one. And while some albiris sellers ship international, more seem not too (and only small books).
I could see many more complications if Bookmooch were to act as a middle man to the many people who sell books on Albiris, would Bookmooch give refunds? A whole new level of management for sure.

I love the simplicity of Bookmooch and the way that books are traded so quickly and freely, with some execeptions. This idea would add so much complexity to the system and for very little benefit over Bookmooch members simply buying their own used books as needed.

I also found it extremely interesting that in a previous blog post (Wishlist griping) people complained about how they can't find books they want on BM, whereas here (A dangerous idea) the exact opposite occurred, with many, many comments like this:

Personally, I have no trouble finding books I want to mooch. I haven't been here long, and I like a pretty wide variety of books (sci fi, fantasy, horror, non-fiction) so I've managed to mooch quite a few books - mainly specific books or books by specific authors that I wanted. I managed to find a lot of them "locally" (ie from UK members), but don't mind mooching internationally so that gives me more options, and I send internationally too.

and

I am happy with BM as it stands now. My wishlist books pop up regularly to be mooched and I browse my recommendations. One just has to have patience, if not then the bookstore will welcome you.

and

I really don't see anything at all wrong with the books availble on Bookmooch, the current bestsellers always become available in time. I always get more books here than I did when at PBS.

and

At first I thought it's hard to find books to mooch, but then I realised that this is also an opportunity to find new favourite authors. Browsing inventories of people who list books I like, using the recommendations option (I use Amazons recommendations too, it's handy sometimes), and even getting author recommendations from other members - that just happened to me and I was pleasantly surprised.

and on and on and on... (grin)

If nothing else, it was *really* useful to me to bring up this topic, so that those actually finding things to read on BM were motivated to speak up!

Several commentators raised interesting points:

Before the USA, Britain had (and maybe still does?) "subscription libraries" that worked exactly like this. I don't think it's a bad idea, but it's going to take a lot of time, thought, and input from a variety of sources to tweak the model until it's going to optimized efficiency and results.

A few years ago, a friend took me to the London Library, a private, paid-membership-based library. You pay to join, and the membership dues go to buy books that members want. I saw a few famous writers working there on my brief tour, and the Library is still thriving, even in this age of Amazon. I suspect that visit is what gave me A dangerous idea

The problem of how the premium membership might actually work was raised:

John, is there any way you could do some simulations, getting an idea of what kinds of discounts there would be, what shipping costs, etc.? Alibris has many low-priced used books, and many others at much higher prices, so would there be a cut-off for moochable books?

I had started to run some numbers, but everything rested on a certain assumption of how many premium books would be re-given into BookMooch. If that percentage was low, this idea would simply be a volume-purchasing scheme, perhaps with a 20% discount, and not that compelling to me. Several people gave their opinion that their wishlisted books are the ones most likely to be kept by them, especially if they received them by paying membership dues. If that were true (and there's no reason to doubt it) then the math for the dangerous idea wouldn't look very good.

Two people raised the "auction" idea:

An 'automooch' wishlist which cost 1 point the moment you put something on the list _besides_ the point(s) the actual mooch will cost. Since it's expensive you won't put many books on it. The extra point will go to BM, so it'll act as a 'point sink', which is good

There are a few good reasons this is a good idea:

1) by introducing variable pricing, the price for in-demand books would go up, both increasing the motivation to list them, but also more accurately representing the value to the person who obtains the book

2) not all of the increased price need necessarily go to the book giver. Ie, if the book "cost" 8 points, perhaps 4 would go to the sender, and 4 would be absorbed by BM, as a de-inflationary force.

3) "net givers", those people who tend to give a lot more books than they ever mooch, would be more motivated to continue using BM

The negatives that I can think of are:

1) it adds a layer of complication for members

2) would book givers "game the system" and start not listing books unless they could receive multiple points for them? This *is* what happened a few years ago when I offered a 2x multiplier on giving books that were wishlisted.

But, overall, I think it's a good idea and I've got it on my "possible" list to do.

---

A few people indicated fear that this meant BM was in financial trouble and might bring ads or worse:

And I hope you don't mean to bring in ads, or have the site be much different in the new membership area. I would hope we wouldn't have to indure those pop up adds, on some sites... or commercials/advertising

Not to worry, I really dislike ads, and the "give a little" system has been bringing in enough through donations that expenses are being met, and as I mentioned previously, the BM bank account has a bit over $3000 in it at the moment, enough to buy a new hard drive, or medium sized server, if an emergency occurs.

I liked this comment:

I'm not sure about the $10 a month �however, I'd probably be willing to both offer points back to bookmooch, or even pay a yearly or one-time fee (say $25) to kick off BM to use its data to pick the books that will seed the community the best. I don't need a "premium" privilege, but a "badge" would be fine to let other people know that I've contributed to the community.

because it suggests that we keep thinking of creative ways in which our power as a community of book lovers, readers and moochers might be leveraged to give us all more good stuff to read. Let's keep thinking!

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

A dangerous idea

John Buckman — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 03:24:39 GMT

A dangerous idea

I mentioned yesterday that I had a radical idea of greatly increasing the number of "high quality" books in BM, but that I haven't brought it up because lots of people would hate it.

So... as a precursor to me telling you, understand that this is "just an idea" and is not "something I plan to do". Rather, it's just me "thinking outside the box" about possible directions BM could take, and what that would mean.

Without further ado...

My "dangerous idea" would be to create a "BookMooch Premium Membership" that you would pay monthly for, something like $10/month. The free use of BM would continue unchanged, and paying for a membership would be entirely optional. If you chose not to pay, BM would continue to exist for you as it does today. However, if you did decide to become a paying member...

That $10/month would be pooled together and used to buy books at a steep discount from a Used Book Aggregator (such as "A Libris" http://www.alibris.com/). As a Premium Member, you'd be allowed to mooch XX number of Premium Books per month, which would actually be purchased for you, from your membership fees, from A Libris.

Here are the advantages of this idea:

1) BM can get significant volume discounts because we'd be buying in quantity.

2) the BM buying system can be automated to "jump on" in-demand books that suddenly become available at a good price.

3) I've had several conversations with "A Libris" and shared the BM wishlist database (1.047 million ISBNs) with them. They found that they had over 95% of the BM wishlist available from the individual sellers that make up "A Libris". 73% of the books were less than $25.

4) A "Premium Book" would be one that BM had to buy for a Premium Member. If that member reads and re-lists the book, BM gives it preferentially to another Premium Member. This allows BM to charge less per month, as that $25 book might be circulated among several paying members.

5) A "Premium Book" that is listed that has no "Premium Members" wanting it would then go into general availability.

6) This could potentially hugely increase the number of books on BM that people want.

7) As a "buying cooperative" BM is able to get a significant discount when buying books, much more than you could get on your own.

8) Because a purchased book might be wanted by several moochers, BM can "charge less" to a member who wants it, since several people might end up reading it.

9) When you searched for a book, the search results would show free books first, and Premium Books secondly. You'd have a setting in BM to "opt out" of being told about the Premium Service, and BM would continue to look for you as it does today (commercial free).

10) There is currently $3,188.72 in the BookMooch bank account (thanks to people who "give a little") which could be used to kick start it.

11) Before people assume, let me say that my goal with this idea is not to "cash in" on BM but rather to leverage the power of size, interest and community that BM has. 30,000 active book swappers is a very significant force, and focussed in certain directions could do even more wonderful things.

Now, some significant downsides:

1) it would likely completely change the feel of BM. BM would no longer be non-commercial.

2) Moochers would no longer all be on an equal footing: there would be two tiers.

3) I don't know what the right membership fee should be, or how many books per month you should get for that. I'd have to experiment with it, and change terms over time as we see if this idea worked or not.

4) Would this help feed the "free side" of BM, or starve it? I don't know.

5) People might not be interested in a paying membership at all and it could be a waste of my time and BM's financial resources.

Now, before you post a comment in reply to this dangerous idea, understand again that it's just a crazy idea, not something I'm planning on doing, but nonetheless interesting and worthy of contemplation and discussion.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Wishlist griping

John Buckman — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 03:40:34 GMT

Wishlist griping

There were a few blog comments recently along these lines:

I was under the impression that we were soon going to do something to remedy BookMooch's woefully small catalogue of books available for mooching...

And I wanted to respond.

Generally, I think the problem here is not an inventory one (there are a half million books available for mooching!) but rather one of expectations.

The reality of BookMooch is that people tend to give away books that are not-very-in-demand (ie books that they didn't like, or that were popular a few years ago) and so there will never be a huge supply of "high quality books" because that's not what people give away (by "high quality books" I mean books that are currently popular and sell well in stores at the moment). There will always be griping that people can't get books on their wishlist, that's just how it will be.

The current best way to find something to read is to look at your personal recommendations. It is refreshed frequently and fairly good at suggesting moochable books you might like reading. Click "recommendations" on the browse page. I find the recommendations to be quite good, as BM suggests a number of books I have read and enjoyed that BM didn't know I had read, so the matchup with my tastes is relatively accurate.

With a half million books available for mooching, there are plenty of books available if you're willing to explore and try books out based on availability on BM, rather than whatever outside method you came to want a book and put it on your wishlist.

So, to that end, my focus will be on making it easier to find books you might want in the existing catalog. Three things are on my todo list, but all are major projects and a lot of work:

1) cover images for most books, and a visual browser of books by covers with jumping from recommendations and similar books.

2) replacing the amazon book topics with much better data, probably from librarything, so that topic browsing becomes more helpful.

3) a completely new search engine

As to enlarging the available inventory, I do have one radical idea for that, but quite a few people are going to hate it, so I'm not sure I wanted to bring it up.... but I will in another blog entry.

While you are here, John, anyway you can talk to us about all the suggestions/proposals you mentioned in your big changes blogposts, and we haven't heard anything about since? (some of the stuff in "Followup to points discussion", for example, which some of us have commented on recently)

I read all the comments, but I really don't have time to personally engage on the forums and respond to everything.

There are 30,000 active moochers, and just one of me. For about two weeks I participated heavily on the forums, and I did absolutely no work for those two weeks. I know people were very happy to see me active on the forums, but I'm not joking when I say I got no work done at all when I was active on the forums.

Programming is slow and hard work, and it's just too time consuming to answer everything on the forums and also get programming work done.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

New feature: auto-focus

John Buckman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:32:03 GMT

New feature: auto-focus

I added a small feature today that I've received quite a few emails about.

Now: on most forms, the cursor moves automatically to the first (or most appropriate) field for you to fill out. This is a feature commonly referred to as "auto-focus."

For example, when you go to the add to inventory page:

the search field automatically gets the focus.

Then, after you add that book, the "search" field gets the focus so you can easily add another book.

This saves a few clicks, especially when adding lots of books.

I applied this "auto-focus" feature to most of the forms on BM that came to mind as needing it.

However, if you find a form where it'd be appropriate, it was likely an oversight of mine, so please leave a comment on this blog entry and I'll apply the "auto-focus" trick to it as well.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

For techies: data feed of book prices

John Buckman — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:10:03 GMT

For techies: data feed of book prices

Last week, the University of Maryland team (who are conducting research on BookMooch) told me they wanted to see if they could answer the question: "does a used book's price effect whether someone mooches it or not?"

I thought this was an interesting question, but I wasn't providing the data in the API to obtain a solution. So...

The "best price" data is now available in various forms:
1) as part of the XML and MySQL database exports
2) with a new API call, to obtain the best price for a single book

Note that the data provided includes the best new-book price, best used-book price, and Amazon's own new book price. It also provides data from all the various Amazon worldwide stores. In the future, if I add other sources for buying books (such as ABE or Alibris) those prices will appear in the data feed as well.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Feedback +0.1 no longer

John Buckman — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:03:06 GMT

Feedback +0.1 no longer

As I blogged last week, the +0.1 points you get for leaving feedback when receiving a book no longer occurs.

This change applies only to feedback left from this point forward: any points you earned in the past are unchanged.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Youtube: Rachael Ray TV covers BM

John Buckman — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:33:36 GMT

Youtube: Rachael Ray TV covers BM

Nice publicity, this!

It's also interesting that BM is represented as "give 1 book, get 2 books," which I suspect is how some people see the mooch ratio feature.

I looked at yesterday's web logs, and see that the TV show sent about 9000 people to us on the day of the show, and about 3000 new users the day after, about a 19% increase the day after the show. Welcome, new moochers!

John Buckman
2 years ago

Followup to points discussion

John Buckman — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:48:26 GMT

Followup to points discussion

11 days ago I wrote a blog entry entitled Points policy change thoughts and yesterday I read through the 257 comments that message generated. There were lots of helpful ideas in the comments, and I'd like to comment on a bunch of them here, in a new blog entry.

I have always asked for a change to be made in "keep it forever:" due to the fact that you may not keep forever BMjournals mooched, but if you prefer people to recycle popular books it might be better to suggest "you do not have to relist all books in your inventory but are encouraged to recycle wishlisted books and BMjournals promptly."

I like your suggestion and will do it shortly.

this was very interesting:

stefano:
My solution is akin yours, John:
1. Consider the book listing bonus as an advance payment: when the book is mooched, the moocher pays 1 point, but the book owner receives only 0.9 points (she already received 1/10 point when she listed the book). The 1/10 reduction may also be seen as a "delisting charge" (the book is no more listed).
idea: 1.1 to mooch, or 0.9 to mooch, both possible

You're right, that every book you give away earns you 1.1 points:

You get 0.1 for listing it
You get 1.0 for sending it

That's another source of inflation.

I see two ways of dealing with this, either:

You get 0.1 for listing it
You get .9 for sending it

You get 0.1 for listing it
You get 1.0 for sending it
But the sender pays 1.1 to receive it.

I'd have to explain the +0.1 as "an advance, you get the remaining 0.9 when someone mooches your book"

What do people think of this?

I would like to see a "not trading" status, so the books on the lists of vacationers and possible inactive, don't show up as mooch-able. This would also give a more realistic picture of the possible moochers for our inventory.

This happens already. Anyone on vacation is "not trading" and their books are removed from the BM inventory.

To put someone on vacation, mooch from them. If they don't reply after 2 weeks, cancel the mooch, indicating they were non-responsive, and their account will automatically be vacationed.

Multi-mooches are not necessarily an incentive for non-US senders. We don't have flat-rate envelopes here in France either - each parcel is weighed, so multi-mooches would cost the sender more.
and
In terms of multi-mooch, from the commentary I've read, this only seems to benefit the USA with its flat-rate packages. Many of the rest of us are weight-based and while there is a tiny improvement of �/100g as the package gets heavier,
and
Please don't change the international points! And the multi-mooch bonus is (as lots of people have commented) only a bonus if you live in a country where flat rate mailing is possible. Here in NZ we're charged by weight. Multi-mooches can actually cost me more to send per item if the additional weight tips into the next bracket. Please keep in mind that not all moochers live in the US or UK, and what's great for you guys may be awful for the rest of us.
and
As mentioned elsewhere, multi-mooching would unfortunately not be an improvement. In Germany (as some other European countries mentioned here) we pay per weight. I have not yet posted a package where 2 paperbacks were under 500g, doubling the postage.
and
I agree with many other comments from Australians; it doesn't cost us less to send multiple books - but more, often a lot more, as we pay by weight and a different rate depending on the country it is being sent to, and parcel rates get put up by our postal service every 3 months. So I wouldn't want to get less points for sending internationally; which I do a lot.

I don't agree with these comments against multi-mooching.

To recap : the idea behind multimooching is that the 2nd mooch from the same person would cost you less (perhaps .8 pts) and BM would make up the difference, so the book giver still receives 1 point.

This helps save the book sender money in postage.

In most postal services in the world, it is cheaper to send 2 books in *one envelope*, than it is to send 2 books in *two envelopes*.

How much cheaper?

In France, I found that 250 grams cost the same to send internationally as 1 kilo, and a kilo is a lot of books.

In the UK, it costs �0.81 to send 250 grams, and �1.11 to send 500 grams, a 32% savings.

In Germany, a domestic package up to 2 kilos costs �3.90 while a domestic package up to 10 kilos costs �5.90

If your countries' postal system doesn't work like this (perhaps because you bump up to another postage class) then send the books in separate envelopes to save money.

I'm finding people list books, but then when I go to their profile, they're sitting on 20+ book to send out. One woman had over 60 to send when I wanted to Mooch something. That shouldn't be allowed. Maybe a system of not allowing any Mooches if you have over say 10 waiting to go out or they've been there longer than 2 weeks. And by any Mooches, I mean you can't Mooch and no one else can Mooch from you.

A few comments about this:

1) if you think she's acting in bad faith, and doesn't plan to actually send those books (it's a judgment call you can make by looking at her bio) -- *ask her by email* why she has so many books to send. And if you don't like the answer, click the "report abuse" button.

2) there could be an honest cause for this: a good moocher who is traveling at the moment, and so has a lot of backlogged requests, but wanted to mooch a book with the points she has while traveling.

John, I thought you might be interested - A member of another book swap told me that a rumor was going around that there are a high percentage of books that aren't received here. I have had very few problems but that kind of rumor may have had some affect on the use statistics.

We've never seen that as a significant problem at BM. Maybe 10 scamming members over the entire history of BM have managed to do that, and it happens very rarely nowadays with the new oversight controls the admins have.

Ive been looking at the bookmooch statistics and I would just like to point out the following:
Date................Points/Member.......Books Listed/Member(
2007.8.18_________ 3.6 ___________ 9.2
(2008.8.18_________ 4.8 ___________ 6.1
(2009.8.18_________ 5.2 ___________ 3.9
(2010.8.18_________ 5.4 ___________ 2.4(
2011.1.09_________ 5.5 ___________ 2.0
The current point system leads to an increase in average points per member because points are added to the economy each time someone mooches a book (+0.2 points per domestic mooch, +1.2 points per international mooch).
Probably, as people accumulate more points, their motivation to add books to their inventory decreases. If people had fewer points, they would probably be more motivated to add books to their inventory in order to generate some points.

This would seem to indicate that we need a point system that keeps the average points per member lower, thus motivating members to add books to their inventory and send books to other members in order to generate points.

Your math is *almost* right, but wrong in an important way. The number you're using for "points in the system" currently includes all points, including those from inactive accounts, which account for 80% of members. In order to give an accurate idea of points inflation, you need to divide "books available by active members" by "points owned by active members"

Roughly, if you divide the available points by 5 (only 1/5 of existing members are actually active) you get very different results.

However, I agree with you that this is a potentially very interesting chart, and I plan on producing a mathematically accurate one soon.

I've bumped into a lot of people recently who are not sending books they have listed currently. I understand the financial reasons, but that also adds to the draw on available titles.

Click on the "report abuse" button. If someone is listing books in their inventory but not willing to send them, that's not right. They should remove those books from their inventory.

John, here's a prospective idea. What if those 0.1 points are *never* given for listing books that already have, say, more than 10 copies in the system? Might that help cut down on potential abuse? Or help encourage people to donate those to charity instead or something? I don't think that would be unfair; it's not a punishment, as people can still list those books if they want (and potentially earn a point if it gets mooched). It's just a lack of reward, because the listing itself does not give anything to the community, so it wouldn't need rewarding.

Here are a few objections I have with that idea:

1) there might not be copies of that popular book in your country. For instance, maybe there is lots of Dan Brown in the USA, but none in the Philippines. Definitely the person listing it in the Philippines should get the +0.1 for listing it.

2) It'd be very complicated, for example when/if you remove books from your inventory, I also remove the +0.1 you received. If you received the +0.1 for listing some books but not others, then BM would have to do the same when removing the books, and this would both be complicated to program, but also quite complicated for members to understand. Often, it would simply look like a bug: "why did I lose 0.1 points when removing some books from my inventory and not others?"

3) The top 200 most listed titles account for only 2.5% of the total inventory on BM. I don't think they're much of a problem.

Conversely, it might be a great idea to give an extra 0.1 point or something to people who post a book with more than 5 (or 10?) wishlisters. Those two in conjunction would balance each other out, and might help shift BookMooch inventories just a little more towards variety. And I'm sure we would all love to see more variety!

That's a variation that might work, but there are some complications too:

1) I did mention that a wishlist bonus existed when BM started, and was removed because of the weird behaviors it caused. A common one was that people would not list books until they were wishlisted. Probably, with what you suggest, the same problem would occur, with people not listing books until 5 people wishlist them.

2) Geographic spread is also an issue here: if you list a book that's rare in a certain country, that's really nice of you, and should be rewarded.

3) a related idea that I've toyed with is that potential moochers could add a "reward" on certain books they really want, saying "I'll smooch 2 points to whoever gives me this book I really want to read"

I'm also okay with the idea of putting a cap on how many books a person can earn 0.1 point for in their inventory. Say, 100 books, or 10 points total? That seems reasonable, and it wouldn't hurt anyone long-term, as anyone who's listed more than 100 books has probably got dedication (and sufficient points to start mooching) towards the site, anyway.

I'm not too hot on this idea for a few reasons:

1) some of our best members have given and received several thousand books. Every book they add to their inventory enlarges our universe, and I see no reason to demotivate them.

2) same problem as above: "It'd be very complicated, for example when/if you remove books from your inventory, I also remove the +0.1 you received. If you received the +0.1 for listing some books but not others, then BM would have to do the same when removing the books, and this would both be complicated to program, but also quite complicated for members to understand. Often, it would simply look like a bug: "why did I lose 0.1 points when removing some books from my inventory and not others?"

Eliminating the 0.1 point for marking a book received, in every situation, also seems fair. It's not necessary; anyone who's planning to stay active in the site is *going* to mark books received. The incentive might help newer members remember, but I've always thought it was a bonus that was nice but totally unnecessary. I think that, to most people, "telling the person who sent you the book that it arrived safely" (especially when the system provides a way to do this with very little effort) would be an obvious common courtesy.

Thanks for all the people who agreed with this -- your feedback was the cause of my announcing that change: End of +.1 for leaving feedback

I think points should be awarded when the book is marked received. Not when accepted to send, and not when the book is actually sent. This would curtail the practice of accepting books to send and then not sending them... as there would be no reward for that dishonest and/or forgetful behavior.
and
I would like to see the mooch points held in reserve, and not given to the sending member until the books have been marked received.
I noticed that when I had to cancel, because the member had not responded for several weeks, their pending listed them with both mooches and sends.

I disagree for a few reasons:

1) this would hugely slow down international trade. It's not unusual for a book to take 8 weeks to arrive somewhere, and in the meantime the person who sent the book can't participate in BM until the book is received.

2) we have very little fraud of this type (people saying they sent books but didn't) as it's caught very quickly by people reporting abuse and the admins jumping on it. Also, we monitor accounts that say they're sending a ton of books out internationally on their first few days of joining. That's pretty suspicious and their ability to mooch with those points is limited until the books start arriving at their destination. Algorithms running in the background at BM mark lots of behaviors as "needing admin oversight", which simply means that an admin looks at them and monitors them by hand, applying limits as they see fit. This system of the having admins watching certain accounts has worked really well.

3) the "first day thrill" on BM would be very much curtailed if I changed this. If you're honest (and almost everyone joining BM is) it's great to list 10 books, get 3 mooches, and then in the same hour, mooch 3 more books as you package those 3 books to send.

4) BM is a community of trust, not of suspicion, and this policy sends a very clear message of trust. PBS, I feel, is a much more untrusting, suspicious place, and from what I read, the number of trades per day is much lower for most users, because of their approach.

Someone who uses PBS explains why they don't like that approach:

I use both Bookmooch and Paperback Swap. Paperback Swap is much more stingy than Bookmooch and I don't like it as well for that reason. If I send a book using my own postage I don't get my point until it's received. Because of that I miss books I've been waiting for as my point has not come in yet. They also don't give anything for listing, etc. Why I wonder. These points cost no one. The more points people have the more they will mooch and the more others get and the busier the site. Even people who don't send, eventually you cancel and that point is taken away.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Rachael Ray TV Segment on BM

John Buckman — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:16:29 GMT

Rachael Ray TV Segment on BM

We've been talking to the Rachael Ray TV show for a few months, as they wanted to do a segment on BookMooch.

If you are curious and have a TV nearby, the producers have told me that the BookMooch segment will air on January 25.

I don't know how long the segment will be, but they did ask me to sign some paperwork allowing them to use our graphics, and the producers have been regularly sending me email, so I have hopes that it's more than 10 seconds long.

Reading Rachael Ray Wikipedia page, I was delighted to see that she's quite the fun wordsmith:

On her television programs, she has used catch phrases such as "EVOO" (extra-virgin olive oil), "yum-o," "G.B." (garbage bowl), "Oh my gravy!", "entr�etizer" (entr�e-sized appetizer), "stoup" (cross between a soup and stew), and "choup."In 2007, The Oxford American College Dictionary announced the addition of the term EVOO, short for extra-virgin olive oil, which Ray had helped to popularize, and credited her with coining the phrase.

Fun tidbit: apparently Rachael Ray is the 14th most powerful person in the food industry.

I don't have cable tv at home, and won't be able to watch this, so if someone can upload the segment to youtube, that'd be great.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Not much junk on BM

John Buckman — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:47:28 GMT

Not much junk on BM

There was a somewhat heated discussion about "junk books" recently in the comments to this blog entry: Followup 2: intl mooch ratio change

My own personal definition of a "junk book" is "a book that was listed on BM a long time ago, and never mooched." I don't make any judgements about "romance" being a "junk genre". For me, if someone else wants it, it's not junk. Junk is stuff that nobody wants.

I began thinking about things I could do to remove "junk books" from BM. One idea was perhaps to take the +0.1 point away if a book is not mooched in a year.

But... I realized I was getting ahead of myself.

I should rather ask "how many junk books are there really on BM?" Is this a real problem?

The best answer to that for me, would be by answering the question "how many books have been listed on BM for a long time and never mooched?".

Luckily, moocher Brett Tomlinson' extensive analysis answers this question. Here is his chart:

It looks to me like about 50% of books are less-than-one-year-old in BM, and about 75% are less-than-two-years-old.

Only 25% of the books on BM have been here over 2 years.

Most of the books on BM are recent, and are not considered junk, since they do get mooched.

Books added to inventory tend to get mooched, and there are lots of recently added books (50,000 in the past two months)

This makes the BM inventory of books look pretty healthy.

If there's a perception that there's a lot of junk on BM, it might simply be that BM is not very good at meeting people's expectations of what they might find (ie, it's not good at getting current best-sellers) and/or the browsing/recommendation system isn't satisfying people's book finding desires.

ps: does everyone know about their "personal recommendations" page (it's linked off your bio page)? Mine lists lots of interesting and moochable ideas: http://bookmooch.com/m/recommendations/buckman_ca/9999

pps: my apologies for all the recent blog entries! I'm just pretty jazzed up by all the interest in this topic.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Charitable Fund for Angels

John Buckman — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:15:51 GMT

Charitable Fund for Angels

I've started a new charitable fund for BookMooch Angels.

The goal is to give an extra point to reward people who act as Angels, helping books get from one country to another.

I've just given 20 of my personal points to this charity, and another 30 points from my general-purpose BM charitable fund.

If you love what Angels do, please
click here to give some of your points to support them.

Admin Mark had the idea, and I really liked it. Initially, the idea is for Mark to be able to give an extra point to people who act as Angels and who ask for the extra point. Over time, Mark will likely delegate that administrative role to someone else.

One reason for setting up this fund is that in 3 months' time, international mooches will cost 3 points (they cost 2 points today) and so the incentive to be a BM angel will be lower, as an Angel earns two points for each book they ferry onwards (they spend one point to get the book, then get 3 points when they send it, for a net total of 2 points). This is explained in a recent blog entry: Coming: 3 point intl mooches

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Coming: 3 point intl mooches

John Buckman — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:48:51 GMT

Coming: 3 point intl mooches

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:

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.
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.
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.

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)"

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.
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:

this change will not occur until after April 20th
this change may not be permanent. I might revert to the old system after a testing period.
international mooches will cost 3 points, and the sender will receive 3 points.
Over time, this should help increase international trade
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

John Buckman
2 years ago

End of +.1 for leaving feedback

John Buckman — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:36:56 GMT

End of +.1 for leaving feedback

As of late next week, you will no longer receive a +0.1 point for each mooched book that you acknowledge as receiving.

This change will have no effect on your existing points.

The reason for this change is:

1) everyone is expected to mark a book as received as part of the mooching process, if for no other reason than to get it off your "pending" page, but also just to be courteous.

2) it makes each domestic mooch actually cost 0.9 points (1 point to mooch, then later a 10% refund of 0.1 points), which really isn't necessary, since people usually are happy enough to spend a point to get a book, and don't need a further incentive

3) it inflates the economy without a significant benefit.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Followup 2: intl mooch ratio change

John Buckman — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 12:20:28 GMT

Followup 2: intl mooch ratio change

There seems to be a few people who don't understand the recent ratio changes, with the result (I believe) that people have become worked up mostly because of misunderstanding.

I'm going to try to clear up some of the misunderstandings in this blog entry, and perhaps that will help things.

but first, I wanted to quote Stephanie as an especially clear-headed voice:

I have read every comment, and there are a couple of points that some people seem to be missing.
If you *SEND* internationally at least as many as you *MOOCH* internationally, this new system makes your ratio the same or better. I, for example, have sent *MORE* internationally than I have mooched internationally, and the change improved my ratio.
And it is, after all, SENDING internationally that we are trying to encourage! As far as I know, there has never been an effort to increase MOOCHING internationally.

Second, why do people care, as long as the ratio stays below 2? Nothing will happen until then! A ratio of 1.8 is just as "good" as a ratio of 1.1. The only thing the ratio does is cut you off from mooching more books if it goes over 2. That's it. Really. And if that happens, well, gee, that's your key to go find another book to put in your inventory.

Thanks Stephanie!

There is a lot of repetition among the comments, so I'm going to pull out a few representative ones and reply to them. Here is one from Lavone:

Being a non math person, I have never understood the ratio. I always looked at the # of books received and the # of books sent and as long as I was well balanced, I thought I was okay. I also looked at the explanation of the ratio which was more beneficial to me. Prior to this retro change that number was 3.44 books given for each one received. I have sent 940 books (165 international), received 361 (40 international) and my ratio is .35:1 which means nothing to me. But I now see that I have sent 2.82 books for each one received. I thought that was good but maybe now it means bad. Can I continue to mooch or will others think I am greedy? I am just not sure anymore.

I want to be able to mooch books from my favorite Canadian friend and I want to continue to send to moochers in other countries who want my books but I am confused.

BookMooch exchanges work mostly on the basis of points. The vast majority of users never need to think about their "mooch ratio".

Is it possible to say how many members will now be pushed to near or over the the 2:1 ratio? e.g. how many people are actually going to be negatively affected by this change?

I asked Admin Mark to look at the mooch ratios of all the people who commented on the previous blog entries, and he hasn't been able to find anyone who would be over the 2:1 ratio, and thus not able to spend their points.

Bear in mind that you can still mooch 2x as many books internationally as you give, which strikes me as quite generous.

The reason the mooch ratio exists is because there are two main ways to earn points:
1) send books
2) add books to your inventory

The mooch ratio exists because without it, you could add tons and tons of books to your inventory that nobody wants, and yet be able to mooch books from others to your heart's content.

That didn't seem right, so I added the concept of a "mooch ratio" so that BookMooch is mostly about #1 above (you send a book, you get a book), with an incentive to add books to your inventory, but a limit of "2 books received for 1 sent" no matter what you do to earn points.

This (change) certainly won't encourage international sending/mooching!
and another:
This doesn't encourage international mooching at all.

Actually, I made this change precisely because I believe it *will* encourage international sending.

Previously, with the old mooch ratio, you could mooch 3 books internationally for every international book you sent. That creates a dis-incentive to *send* that many international books, since you just earned a threefold credit for the one book you sent.

With not enough people motived to send books internationally, that means that mooching internationally gets harder.

Under the new mooch ratio system there needs to be a (relative) equality between books you mooch internationally and books you send internationally. That way, there are plenty of people motivated to send books internationaly, which thus creates a greater sphere of international mooching.

The About/Points Explained pages still say that international mooches cost only 2 points (as of a few minutes ago). From what i can tell, this is just an adjustment in ratio calculations, but not a change to the actual point cost of international mooching -- is this correct? (It would definitely discourage international mooching if the point cost has gone up.)

I appreciate that you are trying to prevent mooch imbalance (as in the example you provided).

There is no change in the points at this time: an international mooch costs 2 points, but the sender receives 3 points.

However, there have been suggestions (on the previous blog entry, for instance) that this 2/3 disequilibrium (I call it an "incentive") should be removed, and there is logic to that argument, but that's not something happening now.

I thought BookMooch was trying to encourage international mooching. One of the ways you do this is a bonus point on international mooching, and you have said before that we should be able to spend those points as well.

But now all of a sudden you think it is wrong to receive more books than you get, and you enforce this on us without so much as a warning.

Think for a second on a larger scale: how can *everyone* receive more books than they send? That isn't possible.

At some point, BookMooch needs to balance out so that most users are sending one book for every book they receive.

There are many people who are happy to give more than they receive (I'm one of them, and have given 7 books for every book I've received) but not enough of us to balance out against the people who receive more than they get.

Because of this reality, the total catalog size in BookMooch has been shrinking for the past 2 years, and I want to fix that.

Dude, I understand what you're trying to do economically, but it's just as short-sighted as protectionism was. In fact, it's a form of that.

In bookmooch economic terms, you're basically putting barriers around international trade. Before, you used to have incentives around international trade. Now you have an incentive for domestic traffic and a disincentive for international traffic. (Bit more complicated than that but let's not argue trivialities.)

I don't see how the change in mooch ratio can be seen as a form of protectionism. To the contrary, what the change causes is an increased incentive to send more books internationally.

The parallel you make isn't valid: the "you receive 3 points for giving a book internationally" bonus is a form of promotion of international trade, not a barrier. The change in mooch ratio calculation promotes balance of trade, which is an important health measure of international trade.

I appreciate your clarifications here, but in contrast to most people here I still don't feel this is a major deal.
However, I agree that the graph showing the number of books in the system *is* worrying. To me, the solution to that is to encourage more books to get into the system, not to mess with other parts of the system.
1) Getting more people to use Bookmooch. More people starting to use the site means more people adding their books to receive points to start mooching themselves (which is also an argument to not remove the points for listing books, at least not for the first 100 books or so).
2) Somehow giving existing users the incentive to add more books and more desired books.
-- I suggested before to give point bonuses for adding books that are on many wishlists, and I still think this would be a workable idea.
-- Someone else suggested the possibility of a bonus for adding books that are less than a certain age, which I think could also increase the average desirability of books added.

-- Another thing that could be considered would be to make it easier to swap magazines as well. As far as I can tell, there is currently no official way to say that something is a magazine. I suppose a binding type of "magazine" would be reasonable. Still, some people are entering magazines to their inventories but since this is currently somewhat haphazardly done it is sometimes a bit difficult to search for them. Even so, I have found and mooched a few and would happily get more. Some of the magazines I've gotten actually contain as much reading as many novels.

Those are all good suggestions, thank you.

As to getting more people to use BM, I agree, and there are improvements on their way there. However, we have to realize that the press's great interest in swapping has both waned, and also that paperbackswap has received more US press than BookMooch, so it's unlikely we'll be able to get that many more members coming to BM.

A better approach, I think, is to maximize the likelihood that newly joining members want to stay.

Your bonus-points-for-wishlisted-books actually existed for the first 6 months of BM, and was removed because it was frequently "gamed". People started refusing to add books to their inventories unless they were on other people's wishlists, and also emailing others asking them to 1st put the book on their wishlist before they added them to their inventories, so they could get the bonus. Sorry, but human nature is what it is...

I agree that there could be greater incentives for giving books that are in great demand, as well as (I think) incentives for quickly reading a high-demand book and giving it back for mooching.

Magazines are swapped on BM, however there both doesn't seem to be high demand for them, and secondly, people have abused this capability by listing lots of magazines that nobody wants, earning points for adding them to their inventories, and mooching like mad.

John, i want to reiterate one of my concerns. Some of us are noticing that people whose proportion of books mooched internationally exceeds their proportion of books sent internationally will have mooch ratios in excess of their "real" ratio. In my case, i will have to try to avoid sending books within Canada if i wish to bring my ratio down... that, or avoid mooching internationally. Either way, this greatly distorts my incentives. It just seems silly that because i frequently take fewer points to send within Canada, despite high domestic postage costs, i'm now slapped with an official mooch ratio that is higher than my actual mooch ratio.

I have to admit that it never occured to me that there were countries where it was cheaper to send to another country than inside your own country. If that's the case in Canada, wow, and I'd like to think a bit more about what could be done in BM to deal with that.

In theory, what should happen is that inside-Canada mooches should cost 2 points, but it's not that simple because it's much more expensive to send from the USA to Canada, then Canada to the USA, which causes disequilibria.

A few people felt that I had singled out Belladonna in a negative way:

You singled out someone's case and pointed out that they have received 3 books for every 2 they've given -- *as if that's a bad thing*. Are you really trying to make a 1:1 economy? Economies need growth to grow, by definition, dammit!
and
I would like to add that Belladonna is an extremely well respected member of bookmooch... Singling any one person out is bad enough, but why not highlight someone who is actually abusing the system, rather than berating one of your best members? For springing this on her as a surprise frankly you owe her an apology at the very least.
and
I have done no accusations of stealing and no name calling and yet I was used as an example in John's response as if I were a criminal. I have not been gaming the system but rather using it as it had been set up previously. I have a flawless feedback record and have sent close to 700 books (international and domestically)in the past 2 years. I am a good moocher and always respond promptly and communicate delays effectively. For John to insinuate otherwise is insulting.
and
I also don't think it was right to call out Belladonna directly with a link to her account. The last time I mooched a couple dozen books from her she donated half the points to a BM charity of my choosing.

I have to admit that I'm pretty baffled that people think I was criticizing Belladonna.

What I was doing was pointing out that Belladonna is an example of an excellent BookMooch citizen whose trading and behavior has been exemplary.

She had written that she felt the mooch ratio made her look like a worse mooch citizen than she actually is, which is why I used her numbers directly.

Belladonna has mooched about 3 books for every 2 she has received, however she has sent significantly more books internationally (63 books more) than she has mooched internationally. That's *great* !

In fact, it's so great, that the existing mooch ratio calculation rewards her great behavior, so that instead of having a mooch ratio of 1.5 hers is 1.15.

So... my apologes for the misunderstanding and for Belladonna feeling hurt. That was not my goal : instead I wanted to pointed out that she should be commended, and that the existing mooch ratio calculation rewards her for her excellent actions.

Anyway, what is it to the Bookmooch economy if people can mooch more books than the ones they send? That's the incentive, right, to keep the site alive?
and
All I care about is for all of us, all of us, to be able to use the points we have paid for, with exorbitant postage fees, to mooch any book we want, when it comes available, by any means allowed.

Think on a larger scale: how can everyone in the BookMooch economy mooch more they send? It's not possible -- each mooch has to have a giver.

If there aren't enough people motivated to give, there is less mooching: makes sense, right?

And by the same token, if you pay "exorbitant postage fees" to send a book internationally, it seems reasonable that you can ask *one person* to pay "exorbitant postage fees" to send you a book. However, it doesn't seem fair to me that you should be able to ask 3 people to pay "exorbitant postage fees" to send you a book internationally because you sent 1 book.

It's both a question of fairness, and also about having a healthy balance.

It seems that angels are now made to look like the greatest scammers of all since we accrue points by doing so much international mailing. & As an angel I give internationally more than I mooch.
and
I had never even thought about the effect that these changes would have on Angels until I read the one of the posts above. I rely so much on these wonderful people, especially those located in Australia.

This is exactly backwards to the reality of the change. Angels are now more rewarded. Two commentators got it right:

I do not understand these fears about the Angels. The Angels mooch domestically and then send internationally -- that should only boost there potential.
and
As someone who gets and gives internationally and has seen a ratio change, I'd like to say that I think this whole thing makes perfect sense to me. John's logic seems well-reasoned and sound and I'd like to thank him for his hard work and thoughtfulness.

Thank you!

Previously, if you sent one book internationally, you could receive 3 international books. The old system diminished the incentives to send books internationally.

Under the new system, when you send a book internationally, you can now only receive one book internationally. Therefore, sending internationally is now worth more under the new mooch ratio system.

I want to be really clear about this: the new ratio system increases the value of angels and provides them with greater rewards. The new mooch ration creates further incentives to be an angel.

I'm sorry if all the economics talk can hard to understand.

As one who sends internationally but receives dozens of requests for international mooches from members unwilling to themselves send internationally, I do think that members ought not to be able to request international mooches unless they are themselves willing to send outside their own country. And by this I mean a proven track record of actually sending internationally, not doing what some do which is to have the "ask" option but then decline anything which is outside their home country, thus giving the appearance of sending internationally without ever having to actually send anything overseas.

This idea was brought up a few years ago for discussion, and most people strongly disagreed. That's why your idea is not current BM policy.

John, I know that you think that it's OK to count mooching internationally as 3x mooching domestically instead of 2x (to match the points), but I just want to add this:
I send 2 books internationally, I get 6 points. ?If I live in a country where there's some domestic mooching traffic, I would be able to use those points to mooch 6 books. My ratio would be 1:1 and everything would be great. ?If I live in a country with very few bookmoochers, or it just happens that all the books that I want are international, I could mooch 3 books with my 6 points. My ratio would then be 1.5:1. If I'm just spending my points, and I have little or no domestic options, why am I being penalized with a worse ratio for that?

You're right, it does seem weird, and it's an artifact of the fact that mooching internationally costs 2 points but the sender receives 3 points. As long as you stay under the 2:1 ratio, you can spend those points.

The "solution" to the problem you point out would be to get rid of the 1-point-bonus for sending internationally, and that's an idea that's currently on the table.

To reply to some of the comments:

The retroactive nature of the change is my biggest problem with it. It's as though our currency has been devalued with no warning

Several people keep saying this, and though I felt I had addressed this, apparently many people don't feel I addressed it head on.

Ok here is why it is retroactive:

1) because I feel that receiving 2 books for every one you send is extremely generous, and that's the way it currently is (after the change)

2) because I feel that anyone who receives *more* than 2 books for each one book they give is abusing the system. I don't care if they earned the points before the old system, I still think it's wrong. Since the old system allowed people to mooch 3 intl books for every 1 they gave, *and* a 2:1 ratio was allowed, this effectively allowed people to mooch up to 6 books internationally and only give one. Once this was pointed out to me, I agree that this was wrong, an oversight on my part, and hence the correction.

3) In response to Lethe's excellent analysis of scenarios that would cause people to go over 2:1, what I (and the admins) have seen is that a moocher has to act in bad faith, such as by adding tons of books that nobody wants to earn points, in order to go over the 2:1 ratio. I don't see any reason why I should retroactively allow a six-books-received/1-book-sent situation, this would only legitimize bad faith use of BookMooch.

4) NOBODY ON THIS FORUM IS BEING CAUGHT BY THIS CHANGE. Not a single person has said that their ratio is over 2:1 and they can no longer mooch. So far, the only people who are over 2:1 are those that that have acted (I and the admins feel) in bad faith, and none of those people are on this forum.

5) BookMooch is under constant attack by scammers. It's not uncommon for 80 bogus accounts to be made in one day. The volunteer admins catch almost all of this activity immediately: the fact that you don't see scammers on this site any more is because I have instituted many behind-the-scenes changes at the admin's request, and this has been quite effective at stopping scammers. Probably half of my programming time goes into features that you never see, that are purely for the admins and for abuse/scam protection. Two years ago, things were much worse and scammers could regularly abuse honest people. This mooch ratio change was made to prevent bad faith use of BM. Nobody on this forum is over 2:1 with the new system, which to me shows that it's a good change and functioning correctly, as the new ratio is not mislabeling any honest moochers.

And the bottom line is:

6) If you still feel that you are entitled to receive 6 books internationally for every one book you send, I disagree with you. I make the rules, and if you disagree, then you can either operate within my rules or use another book trading site. The rules of the site are a combination of my personal views on fairness, my understanding (and research) on trading economics, the admin's experience and judgement, and what the admins and I think will make the site function best. However, at the end of the day, this is not a democracy: I make the rules to promote the long term health of the site, with hours and hours of consultation with the volunteer admins and the input of the community.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Followup : intl mooch ratio change

John Buckman — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:57:07 GMT

Followup : intl mooch ratio change

My mooch ratio was .85:1 and now it is 1.16:1. My understanding was that the bonus was to encourage international mooching. I have almost 200 points in my account and I can see where eventually, if I continue to mooch internationally (which I do quite often) I will get to the point where I will be unable to continue to mooch books (even though I earned the points by sending out books) because my ratio will be too high. At that point I will either have to discontinue using bookmooch or post even more books and get more points that I cannot use.

No, if you continue to mooch internationally and NOT send books internationally, what you write about will happen. If you mooch and give internationally in equal amounts, then there's no problem.

But, to look at your account specifically, you have:
Mooched/given: 972/672

Think about BookMooch as a whole for a minute: how can the entire BookMooch economy survive if I encourage everyone to mooch more books than they receive?

You've received 1.45 books for every book you've given, and you've received almost a thousand books. It's great that you send internationally, and the fact that you've sent more books internationally (236 books) vs mooched internationally (176 books) is the reason your mooch ratio is 1.16, and not 2.02 (which is what it would be, taking into account your pending mooches).

I'd say the current system has rewarded you well: because you've sent internationally more than you've mooched internationally, your mooch ratio is well within the less-than-2:1 mooch ratio limit.

Isn't the (old) mooch ratio calculation (& extra mooch points) supposed to encourage international mooching??

It's supposed to encourage international giving, and it still does that.

If you give a book internationally, you get:

1) 3 points to spend in your country

2) a 3 point bonus to your mooch ratio to spend in your country

To reiterate:

1) if you send a book to another country

2) you get to mooch 3 books in your country

3) OR, you can mooch 1 book from another country

Send a book to another country, get a book from another country -- that seems fair to me.

Or, if you don't see books internationally you want, you send 1 book to another country, and get 3 books in your own country.

One of my mooching acquaintances who is from a country with a relatively small mooching population has mooched 302 books and given 435. But because he has to largely mooch internationally, given the size of the mooching population in his country his mooch ratio is 1.72:1. In other words, he mooches books internationally, but gives quite a few to his fellow countrymen. This new ratio system seems to penalize moochers in countries where there are few options but to mooch internationally, especially if they want to read books in English and are not in an English speaking country.

This is an interesting case, but I think it's still correct.

The basic idea of BookMooch is the 1:1 trade. You give a book, you get a book.

Your example above is from someone who presumably has very few books that other people in other countries want to mooch from them. Therefore, they tend to mooch internationally but send books domestically.

That situation can't exist forever, it's essentially an imbalance of trade, with BM books flowing into that country, but not flowing out. On a macro level, that won't be good for the health of BM.

There are two solutions I see:

1) over time, other members will appear on that country who have books that people outside that country will want, and that will balance the country's trade balance out

2) this person needs to find books that people outside their country want, if they want to be able to mooch internationally.

It's very expensive to send books internationally, often more than 3X more expensive. It's important not to take this for granted. If you are willing to pay the extra postage cost to send a book internationally, I think you should be rewarded and be able to ask someone else to do the same.

My straight ratio, for instance, would be 1.27. But my adjusted ratio is 1.33. If i was to mooch my next 10 books internationally, but send my next 10 books domestically - which i can afford to do - my mooch ratio would rise to 1.37 even though i'd be mooching on a 1:1 basis. Keep in mind that as a Canadian, i wouldn't be saving money by sending these books domestically - far from it!
I can't see how this change makes any sense. It seems that a desire for "symmetry" is outweighing concerns about encouraging international mooching, as many people are pointing out.

The goal of the points system and mooch ratio is *not* to encourage people to mooch a book from a foreign country if the same book is available in your own country. That would be a misuse of resources: more expensive postage, more airline fuel being used to send books further.

The goal of the points system and mooch ratio is to fairly compensate you if you pay the extra money to the postal system to send a book internationally. That's all it's trying to do.

Therefore, if you mooch a book internationally, that causes the sender to pay a lot more to their postal system. If you then give a book internationally, you've had to bear a similar cost, and they should cancel each other out.

Also note that in your example, you would still be way within the 2:1 mooch ratio limit, and not have any restriction on being able to spend your points.

I'm just adding to all the things said above, but it's still worth the repeating. You had stated previously that the ratio imbalance was a bonus to encourage international mooching. Logically, this change (especially on top of your proposed changes to the points allocation for international mooches) can only be because you no longer wish to encourage international mooches?

John, what's really going on here?

Two things prompted this change:

1) I've received many emails from people who have noticed that certain users have hugely imbalanced mooch/give numbers. Often, they would be mooching hugely more books than they were giving. They'd be mooching and giving internationally, but with the old ratio system, you could give as few as 20 books internationally, and receive 120 books internationally (2:1 ratio at a 3x bonus point).

2) As I posted elsewhere, there are some macro-economic signs in the BM economy that some corrections need to be made. Among the more troubling to me is that the total number of books in the system has been declining steadily:

The mooch ratio calculation as it was would contribute to this problem.

So, based on three observations:

1) it "feels right" to many people who wrote to me (and to me) that if you send a book to someone in another country, and pay the extra postage, you should be able to ask someone to send a book to you from another country. That's fair. But, you shouldn't expect more of a reward than that.

2) the old system in fact did lead some people to mooch internationally a lot more than they gave

3) there are some signs of ill-health in the BM economy at a macro level

So, that's why this change was made.

In addition, I saw that Admin Mark made a bunch of comments on the LibraryThing forum, and I'm copying them here as I think they do add to the discussion:

Mark wrote:

The ratio limit only comes into effect when one goes above 2:1, even with this change the accounts I have looked at thus far are still below it, but if anyone is over 2:1 now that was not before, an accommodation can be made.
Members quite often suggest something closer to a 1:1 ratio, which is what some other sites seem to favor.
I think getting two books for each one sent is quite generous, even though many people choose to either give more than they send or maintain a 1:1 out of their own sense of fairness.
The problem was generally perceived to be members in the largest countries, mainly the US, who were not sending books outside of their countries.
So the idea of the original change was to try and encourge these members to send more books outside of their own countries.
But as the bonus was not evenly applied, people who were equally sending and mooching to other countries had no real ratio limit as other members did, this struck some people as unfair.
Quite a few accounts would have been able to mooch 3 or 4 times as many books as sent in time due to this, which was not seen as healthy to the system overall.
He really, really does care a lot about international trading. There are many reasons why the other trading sites have not attempted to be international, it has taken a great amount of work to keep international trading growing as it has been through time on Bookmooch despite ever-escalating postal fees, cultural/language barriers, security issues, etc....
I can see how it does seem unfair, but he didn't have a way to make the change and not have it reflect one's entire trading history.
I'm sure John will respond. My sense is that he did not see many accounts that would go above 2:1 with the change so he did not see it as blocking people's ability to mooch, even those mooching many more books than they send.
The ratio acts more to let someone know that they might be approaching the upper limit, and so few people actually get too close to it.
Competing notions of fairness are very difficult to resolve. He is trying to find a balance between encouraging people to send internationally, but still having a reasonable ratio limit in place that is evenly applied.
I did look at a series of accounts that had mooched close to twice as many books as they had sent (some with thousands of trades) and they were still not over the 2:1 limit.

I hope it is clear how very rarely anyone is actually blocked from mooching based on their ratio limit, and even if it were to begin to happen, it could be lifted for a member in good standing who had points to spend.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Mooch ratio change for international

John Buckman — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:41:16 GMT

Mooch ratio change for international

The way the mooch ratio is calculated has now changed. This change only effects people who give or receive books internationally.

If you give a book to someone in another country, this is counted as sending 3 books for the purpose of your mooch ratio. This hasn't changed.

However, until today, if you then mooched a book from another country, this was only counted as mooching one book.

Several people pointed out to me that this didn't seem right: if you give a book internationally, and then mooch a book internationally, the two should "balance out" and be a 1:1 ratio. Until today, this behavior would result in a 1:3 ratio, and this is no longer the case.

As of today, giving internationally still counts as 3 books sent (no change with that) but mooching internationally now counts as mooching 3 books, so that the two operatings are symmetrical.

This is what my mooch ratio calculation looked like until today:

notice that there is a bonus for giving internationally, but no comparable adjustment for mooching internationally.

As of today, this is what my mooch ratio calculation looks like:

I've also "cleaned up" the way the information is presented so that it's easier to see how the numbers add up.

You can see your own mooch ratio by going to the "Member Home" and clicking the linked "Mooch ratio" text on the top right of your page.

Hopefully, this change won't be too controversial, as it seems to just make sense, and to fix what was essentially an oversight on my part when I programmed the calculation.

-john

I've started a followup thread to this one: Followup : intl mooch ratio change

John Buckman
2 years ago

Swap sites on TV

John Buckman — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 08:00:40 GMT

Swap sites on TV

Google told me about this TV news segment on swap sites. Nicely written and presented.

Swapping instead of shopping: fox10tv.com

John Buckman
2 years ago

BM bookmarks available in USA/UK

BookMooch Bookmarks — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:30:31 GMT

BM bookmarks available in USA/UK

Update: I accidentally didn't list multiple bookmarks available in the UK. I've fixed this now, so you can mooch bookmarks from the UK now.

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

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

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

BookMooch Bookmarks
2 years ago

Points policy change thoughts

John Buckman — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:08:42 GMT

Points policy change thoughts

I recently wrote a blog post Brett Tomlinson's charts and analysis looking at some of the health measurements of BM.

Most things look ok to me, except for the overall decrease of about 15% in mooching this year, vs both the 2008 and 2009 years.

One thing I am thinking about is "monetary policy", or in plain terms, how people earn points on BookMooch.

I read up a *lot* before starting BookMooch, and one of the main problems with other exchange sites was a lack of currency float, which caused the economy to slowly contract, and often ended up with the exchange economy locking up.

Back in 2005, when I was thinking about how points should be earned in BookMooch, I read an article titled "Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op Crisis."

Economist Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article about this babysitter crisis. I quote:

most couples were anxious to add to their reserves by baby-sitting, reluctant to run them down by going out. But one couple's decision to go out was another's chance to baby-sit; so it became difficult to earn coupons. Knowing this, couples became even more reluctant to use their reserves except on special occasions, reducing baby-sitting opportunities still further.

In short, the co-op had fallen into a recession. ... eventually ... more coupons were issued, couples became more willing to go out, opportunities to baby-sit multiplied, and everyone was happy. Eventually, of course, the co-op issued too much scrip, leading to different problems ...

As I looked at macro-economic theory, many economists advocate that a growing economy needs inflation in order to fuel that growth.

That's exactly what I did with BookMooch: I made it fairly easy to earn points, and BookMooch experienced very significant growth, partially thanks to that system, with mooches/year peaking at 750,000 mooches/year.

However, an assumption of this macro-economic theory is that steps will be taken in the future to curb inflation once the economy begins to "cool".

BookMooch is now handling about 550,000 mooches/year. This is still great, but does represent a cooling of the book mooching economy.

So... I think this means it's time to consider changes that will curb mooch point inflation.

You can see on this page how points are earned:
http://bookmooch.com/m/points

Points are created when:
1) you type 10 books in (+1)
2) you leave feedback (+0.1)
3) you mooch a book from another country (+1)

Let me write about each of these in turn.

Number 1 is, I believe, not actually inflation. The reason is that inflation is usually defined as a decrease in the buying power of a unit of currency. If you type 10 books into BM, you have added the equivalent of 10 points of "goods", which others can now use to spend their money. This is perhaps debatable, but I don't think I want to change this reward, as it's the main way a) brand new users earn points to get started and b) provides a great incentive to add books to the BM inventory, thus enriching all of us who already have BM points

Number 2 is something I think we could do without. Everyone leaves feedback automatically when they mark a book as received. This isn't a behavior we really need to promote as it is likely to happen without the +0.1 gift.

Number 3 helps promote international mooching, which is a core personal goal of mine. However, with 1 in 5 mooches being an international mooch, this represents a significant source of inflation (110 points created per day).

There are three solutions I see to this problem:

A) balance the cost of international mooches at 2 points cost, 2 points received by the sender

B) balance the cost of international mooches at 3 points cost, 3 points received by the sender

C) create a new charity account for "promoting international mooching" that members would donate to, and leave the current "2 points to mooch, 3 points to the sender" system, but take the point out the charity account rather than creating a new point. This would prevent inflation, but would also depend on a fairly large donation pool (about 40,000 points/year would need to be donated)

Those are my current ideas for decreasing mooch point inflation.

I also have an idea that would cause modest inflation, but that I think might be worth it.

I would like to promote "multimooching", i.e. the mooching of several books from one person at one time. This saves the sender a lot of money in postage costs.

One way to do this is to make the first mooch 1 point, and then knock 10% off the 2nd mooch, and 20% off the 3rd mooch, like so:

Cost of same country mooches:
1st book: 1 point
2nd book: .9 points
3rd book: .8 points
4th book: .7 points
5th book: .6 points
6th book: .5 points thereafter

Cost of International mooches:
1st book: 2 points
2nd book: 1.8 points
3rd book: 1.6 points
4th book: 1.4 points
5th book: 1.2 points
6th book: 1 point thereafter

With this idea, the points received for sending would stay constant at 1 point/same-country or 2 points/international, only the cost would change.

I'm sure this post will provoke strong reactions from some people, so I urge you to keep in mind that

a) these are only thoughts, not policy and

b) my goal here is to have a discussion, not to dictate or to have people flame war.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Health of BookMooch

John Buckman — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:34:32 GMT

Health of BookMooch

I started a new forum today: BM Health.

In the forum, I've posted an extensive analysis of Brett Tomlinson's charts and analysis.

I also outline the Purpose of this forum.

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?

Overall, while I think BookMooch is still quite healthy, there are some things that could be done to improve its health and help resume the growth that we used to have.

I'll be blogging a bit more about this topic in the future, with some ideas I have of things that might be good to change.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

BM change of address

John Buckman — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:03:18 GMT

BM change of address

A boring blog post...

The new BookMooch postal address is:

BookMooch
454 Las Gallinas Ave #142
San Rafael, CA 94903
USA

If you are sending regular donation checks to BM (more than a few you are, thank you!), please update the address you send to.

I decided to close down the existing postal box that BM used, as the service wanted $660/year to renew it (!), and use the same postal box I use for my home mail that's about 1/3rd the cost (and which I already pay for anyway).

As I said, a somewhat boring blog post...

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Desktop app: BookMoocher

John Buckman — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:50:35 GMT

Desktop app: BookMoocher

Luca Gambetta has written a desktop application for keeping track of recently added books. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download it here.

I tested the Mac version, which appears to be the easiest to install, as you simply download and run it. Using the Windows version isn't too hard, but you do need to first download a big something from Microsoft's web site.

Using "BookMoocher" is very simple: just run it and it shows you 500 recently added books, like so:

you can double-click on a book to mooch it, in which case your web browser pops open to BookMooch. It can also automatically filter books that aren't in your country, which is very handy (and is probably why an Italian wrote it!)

Every 10 minutes, the application updates the book list, and newly added books are in bold.

You can also click the ? icon and get basic book information:

Thanks to Luca for writing and sharing this neat little tool!

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Idea: an hour of me

John Buckman — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:32:58 GMT

Idea: an hour of me

I've been churning an idea in my head for a few years, around the concept of a "skills mooch". I wanted to present it to you and get your thoughts.

The project is currently called "An hour of me" (AnHourOfMe.com) and the idea is that you give an hour (or more) of yourself, doing something you enjoy doing, for someone else. For each hour you give, you earn a point which can be used to get an hour of someone else's time.

These wouldn't be things you do professionally, but hobbies, perhaps an occupation you dream of someday doing professionally, or just something you enjoy doing. This could be things you can do over the internet, via skype and email, though I'm still sorting out how this might work with meeting-up-in-the-world things.

For example, here are some things I love doing and wouldn't mind helping people with:

Things I can do over the Internet:

brainstorming marketing ideas

examining and critiquing new business ideas

photoshop retouching of portrait photos (ie removing zits & blemishes)

Things that require us to meet:

portrait photography, esp for performers, musicians, speakers, ie people who need to look glamorous

audio recording and engineering, both live and in the studio

cooking, especially food of Provence. I'd be willing to cater someone's party.

teaching beginners how to play the renaissance lute

As I've mulled this idea over, the key seems to empower people to do the things they love, the things they wish they did more of. The goal is not to replace money with a new currency and to barter professional services: the normal economy does a good job already of monetizing professional services.

However, I don't think the normal economy provides a means for people to do more of what they love to do, and that's what I'd be trying to unlock. The idea is very much like BookMooch: a book sitting on a bookshelf isn't doing anyone any good, just as a fabulous talent you have which isn't exercised isn't doing anyone any good.

What do you think?

-john

A side question: I have two domains registered for this idea:

http://AnHourOfMe.com

http://AnHourOf.Me

Which do you prefer?

Here are my replies to the comments:

This is not new, I've heard of such initiatives being around locally (i.e. in Poland) and I'm sure you can find them in other parts of the world.

Yes, that is correct, the two main movements are "Time banking" and "LETs". Both work well in their contexts, but I'm trying to do something different.

The main ways this idea is different are:

1) this is not limited to the local. Almost all LETs are locally focussed and often part of an pro-local-community (sometimes anti-global) view.

2) this is not for professional services, which are already well served by modern economies. However, there are few enabling mechanisms for doing what you love to do, if what you love to do happens to not be a (or your) profession.

The key insight behind BookMooch is "a book sitting on a bookshelf isn't doing any good".

The key insight behind AnHourOfMe is "a skill you have and love to do, but never get a chance to, isn't doing anyone any good"

Another key insight:

BookMooch: many people *enjoy* giving a book away, letting someone else read it. The mooch point you receive makes it fair.

AnHourOfMe: you only volunteer to do things that you really enjoy doing. The credit you receive of one hour makes it fair.

I haven't yet seen any LET/barter/time-bank system incorporate either of these two insights.

skillsbox.com: Example, a gardener pays a graphic designer with Skillsbox credits to design him some business cards. The graphic designer then uses her credits to pay a chef for a cookery lesson.
and

http://www.sparked.com/: Let us show you how we can engage your employees!

Both of these are great, but they are both professional-skills oriented.

One other aspect of AnHourOfMe being amateur-oriented, is that this allows the exchanges to be tax-free in most countries, whereas exchanges of professional skills is taxed in most countries.

I wouldn't say that you should explicitly exclude professional services. I'm a software developer, and for the right cause, I do pro bono work. Of course there are probably sites explicitly for that purpose, but still, can't hurt to have some overlap.

That's great, but I suspect that this is partly because you enjoy programming. I do too. If I were less busy, I'd offer programming as an hour of me too. The fact that programming is fun is one big reason open source projects exist.

Alternatively, some people might be willing to do something they don't love, because they get enjoyment out of helping a charity or someone in need. Either way, you're doing it on AnHourOfMe because you enjoy it: the payment is not the primary objective.

I'm assuming it goes by how long it actually takes us to complete the task ie if I'm making a t-shirt quilt for someone it will take SEVERAL hours to do, but retouching a photo may take less. Is that how this would work?

In my current vision, one hour of your time gets you one hour of someone else's time. If someone is willing to give you five hours of currency to make a t-shirt quilt in 5 hours, fantastic. That fact that they do one hour tasks for others isn't relevant -- they have to build up 5 hours' currency somehow.

timebanks.org:
Time Banks Weave Community One Hour at a Time
For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It's that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. Time Banks change neighborhoods and whole communities.

Love it, but this is local-oriented. And it seems more do-stuff-people-need oriented rather than do-what-you-love.

That's not to speak ill of timebanks.org, I think it's fantastic, but it's different from my idea.

Any Swedish reader above the age of 35 will remember the television series Svenska Hj�rtan, sbout life in an ordinary suburbian neighbourhood. It's this and that, the carpenter and the plumber and one helps the other and the cynical teacher of Swedish observes the whole thing and sighs "Who the hell wants to have a poem analyzed"? Well, here someone might even want just that.

Hopefully, with a fairly large user base, there would be people looking to have their poem analyzed. I have a friend who runs http://litopia.com where people do exactly that.

Hell, I once met the owner of http://lulu.com and he referred to his site as "the world's largest collection of bad poetry." Some poetry professors would be very useful!

Would you only be able to list things you can do, or could you also list things you need done?

I'm envisioning AnHourOfMe being a re-purposing of the BookMooch web site.

Here is how each BM page would become an hour of me page:

inventory: this becomes a list of jobs you're willing to do

book details: becomes all about a single job someone might offer. Multiple people can thus list the same job (example: proofreading, or beginner guitar lessons). Jobs that don't yet exist, but you'd like someone to do, can be created manually and put on your wishlist.

search: you would use the BM search feature to find jobs that are available (ie, like moochable books) are un-available (ie unmoochable books). You could wishlist certain jobs and thus be notified when someone starts offering it

pending: jobs people have asked you to do, and you either accept or reject them. If you accept it, then you coordinate with the person to make it happen. The job, when completed is marked as done (like receiving a book) and +1/0/-1 feedback is left.

You see, if I re-use the BookMooch web site technology, but specialized for this idea, then AnHourOfMe becomes a much easier programming and maintenance challenge for me. Plus, the new idea launches as an already-very-mature web site.

John Buckman
2 years ago

New feature: face to face

John Buckman — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:31:23 GMT

New feature: face to face

Ten days ago I hosted my first "Meet and Mooch" in London: [forum:london_moochers] using the Meet and mooch feature.

It was a great success, with about 25 people coming despite the crazy, snowy weather. You can easily organize your own meet and mooch at: http://bookmooch.com/m/meetings -- and it will automatically get promoted to moochers nearby.

What I hadn't expected is that many people brought lots of books that were not (yet) in their BM inventory. These were generally highly-in-demand books that people wanted to give to people they met in person. Or, they were books that people saw on others' wishlists, and were kindly offering from their collection. They didn't want to list them in their inventory, because they didn't want them to be accidentally mooched until after the meeting.

BookMooch doesn't have an easy way to "receive a book face to face". The usual way is to list the book in your inventory, reserve it, and then the other person mooches it, and then finally they mark it as received. Too many steps!

That's why I've added a new feature today: "Face to face".

You can find a button for this feature on the book details page:

How it functions is very simple: you indicate who is giving you this book, and everything else happens in one step.

Here is the "face to face" page:

After your enter the giver's name (or email address) the book is automatically added to their inventory, mooched, one point is transferred and the book is marked as received--all automatically!

I also added this feature to BookMooch Mobile

One other thing I found at the Meet and Mooch, is that I wanted to recommend a book to someone, but had no easy to way to do that with the BookMooch mobile interface. So, today I added a "Recommend this book" button to the mobile interface.

If you're like me, you're always talking about books to your friends, and recommending they read them. Now, you can use your mobile phone and bookmooch to send them an email recommendation in one easy step.

That's it for now!

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Take this BM Survey

John Buckman — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:28:54 GMT

Take this BM Survey

Professor Karl Fast and his students at Kent State are once again studying BookMooch. Their earlier study where they came up with composite profiles of typical users was very interesting, and better yet, useful to me in making BM a better place.

If you have 5 minutes to spare, please take their survey at:

http://kentstate.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_3E0rbNzsCKaH52I

John Buckman
2 years ago

BookMooch Mobile

John Buckman — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 05:19:33 GMT

BookMooch Mobile

"BookMooch Mobile" is now available.

This is an extensive mobile-friendly version of all of BookMooch. It should look very good on iPhones, Android Phones, current Blackberry devices, and be acceptable on old mobile phones.

To go to it, visit http://bookmooch.com/mobile/

When you visit BookMooch with a mobile device, a message appears at the top of the home with a "click here for BookMooch mobile" link. This is what the home page looks like now from an iPhone:

If you want to use the normal BookMooch web site but you're on your mobile device: no problem. Just ignore the "click here" message on the home page and use the web site as normal. The "click here" message only appears on the home page.

The first page you encounter asks you if you are a member or not:

Most of the BookMooch Mobile's features are available only to members.

However, I thought that there would be situations where you might talk to someone about BookMooch, maybe at a book event, and they can sign up on the spot.

Here is the menu of features for non-members:

and a "join bookmooch" page:

If you click the "Existing Member" link, you are asked for your BookMooch name/password, and then you get this Member Main Menu:

Note that the screen above is from an Android phone, just to show you that it looks ok.

On a really ancient mobile phone, this is what the main menu should look like:

Please let me know if the mobile interface looks ok or not on your phone. I went to a lot of trouble to make it look as good possible on those old phones, yet look great on new phones.

You might want to use BookMooch Mobile from a computer if you're somewhere that has very bad Internet connection. There is a link to BookMooch Mobile from the Tools Menu. Here is what the book details page looks like in Firefox:

and on a blackberry 9800:

when you search, any books that are moochable have a Heart icon next to them.

and a "mooch" button appears on the book details page.

Note that you can mooch books, and even "ask first" is implemented.

I implemented most of what you normally do with BookMooch, except: smooches, member bios, save-for-later, advanced search, forums, and charity. In addition, you can only browse for books using search: none of the fancier ways of finding books are in BookMooch mobile. If BookMooch Mobile ends up getting used a lot, I can certainly add the missing features people want on their phone.

More features

You can view book covers by clicking the "cover" button (top right) on any book details page:

You view the books you are giving:

If you click on the "Bring to meeting" link on a book that is a "meet & mooch", you get a nice shopping-list of books you need to bring with you. This is also handy in that you can pop your phone out at the meeting, and indicate the book as "sent" when you hand it to someone. Similarly, people receiving books at a meeting can look at their list and mark them as received at the meeting.

You can manage your inventory:

and you can manage your wishlist:

Other Languages

Note that the mobile site is fully internationalized, and is available in all the same languages as the main site. For example, you can access the French BookMooch Mobile at http://fr.bookmooch.com/mobile/

Here is the join page in French:

and just like the main site, members can correct the translation on the spot. The "correct the translation" link is found at the bottom of every page, normally unobtrusively off-screen (you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page)

which leads to a translation correction page:

Very small files sizes

Data usage from your mobile phone should be pretty tiny.

For example, my inventory page is just 4k uncompressed, and most mobile devices support .gzip compression, in which case my inventory is just a 1661 byte download.

Even at a very expensive foreign data rate, say $10 per meg, it would take 631 views on my inventory page to get to 1 meg of data usage. In another way of looking at it, my inventory would cost 1.5 cents to load if you're paying a $10/meg data plan.

And $10/meg is the most expensive I've ever heard of.

The main reason to have very small files is that mobile internet is often slow, and so small files speed that up. However, it also means lower data costs, if you're on a pay-as-you system.

Do let me know how this works out for you. Did I not include your favorite feature? Does it not look right on your phone? Or do you like it?

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Meet and mooch

John Buckman — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:36:47 GMT

Meet and mooch

As I wrote a month ago, I've been working on a feature to help people meet in the real world and exchange books.

This "meet and mooch" feature is now available. I've decided to kick things off by organizing [forum:london_moochers] and [forum:bay_area_moochers].

Under the "About" button on your home page, there is a new "Meetings" menu.

Anyone can organize a meeting.

A specialized "forum" is created for it, which shows the information about the meeting, who is attending, and makes it easy to browse the inventories of people who will be coming to the meeting. When you click the "attend this meeting" button, a message is automatically posted saying "I will attend this meeting" with a link to your inventory and wishlist. People can also ask you questions on this meeting's forum, and you'll receive them by email.

There is a new "meeting mooch" row on book details, if the book is available for mooching from someone attending a meeting. Instead of clicking "mooch", you click the "meeting mooch" link. This tells the person to bring the book to the meeting instead of postal mailing it.

The pending page automatically notices which books are "meeting mooches" and labels them as such. There is a "books to bring" button in the "pending" section, which gives you a handy list (with covers) of the books you need to bring to a particular meeting.

There is a new announcement forum of all meetings, which is updated automatically: Meet and Mooch. Since it's a forum you can also receive those announcement by email, or subscribe to it as one of "your forums".

Meetings are automatically advertised to relevant members. The advertisement appears on your "member home page" if there's a meeting in your country or (in the USA) state. If a meeting would attract people from other countries or states (such as if the meeting is near a border), the organizer can choose to advertise to neighboring countries or US states.

If you don't want to be shown meetings on your member home page, you can hide them by clicking the new "Do not show me nearby meetings" setting in your profile.

Forums now have a new feature just for admins: "Admins only: email a copy of this message to all members". The incentive for this is for the organizer of a meeting to be able to a) remind everyone who is attending about the meeting, b) if there is a date or venue change, it's important to be able to "push out" the news to everyone, and c) I think this could be generally useful on some other forums. Obviously, I'll be watching how this particular feature is used to make sure it's appropriately used.

I'm not exactly sure how old meetings will "expire". For the time being, I'm thinking that the organizer will (at some point) delete the meeting. I don't want to automatically delete them, because there might be quite useful information in the archives that people are relying on. We'll see how this aspect of it works out. I've always been annoyed at how eBay erases old auctions after a while, but I can see how that can be necessary.

As with all new features at BookMooch, this will likely go through significant improvements over the next few weeks, in response to feedback on this forum. So, please do speak up if you like/dislike certain ways in which it works, or would like to see new things added to it.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

BookMooch mobile?

John Buckman — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:42:32 GMT

BookMooch mobile?

I've been thinking about making a "mobile phone friendly" version of the BookMooch web site.

This idea was inspired by the "toptable.com" mobile web site at http://m.toptable.com/

On their mobile site, you can do the basics of restaurant reservations very quickly. There is minimal text and graphics, so the pages load quickly, and they're formatted to fit well on a mobile phone screen (including the iPhone and Android).

If I did this feature, it would have very basic features, something like this:

a) search for book
b) add to wishlist/save-for-later
c) mooch this book
d) add this book to my inventory

If you visited BookMooch with a mobile phone, the web site would automatically detect this and show you the "mobile phone friendly" version. There would be a link on the bottom of the page to "visit the main site".

I currently occasionally use BM with my iPhone, but I find it both very slow to load, and tedious to have to zoom into the tabs and controls.

The other advantage of making a mobile phone friendly version of the web site, is that it would work with all phones, unlike having to do a dedicated program for the iphone/android/palm/nokia/whatever.

What do you think? Would you use this feature?

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

BM database for academics

John Buckman — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:34:56 GMT

BM database for academics

Two months ago, I received an inquiry from some academics at the Center for Digital Thought and Strategy located at the University of Maryland.

They are researching online bartering systems and wanted to know if I'd work with them to help them analyze BookMooch.

They wanted to do some serious "data mining" and the current database export in XML was pretty unwieldy for the kind of "I wonder if?" exploratory questions they had.

So... I've been working with them pretty heavily for the past 8 weeks, as I think what they're doing is both useful to BookMooch as well as to a much larger community.

The current fruit of this work is that the BookMooch database is now available in a very organized, easy-to-query MySQL format. I've been extremely impressed by the researchers' efforts, as they seem more interested in answering real questions honestly than simply doing enough to get a paper published. A very refreshing attitude!

This has caused them to poke a lot at how BM works, and I've dutifully improved the data exports (both MySQL and XML formats) so that they can be used to answer the questions they have.

If you're interested in "data mining" the BookMooch database for insights, you can download the files here. You might want to tell me what you're up to, as this is all quite new and there might be ways I can improve the export to help you in your work.

Privacy note: the database is totally anonymized, and contains no information that isn't also visible on the BookMooch web site. The data is governed by a Creative Commons license.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Best price feature

John Buckman — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 06:52:18 GMT

Best price feature

An "Amazon price" feature now appears in a few places in BookMooch.

On your wishlist and save-for-later page, a new "Amazon" column now appears.
A price is shown when you add a book to your wishlist, when you look at the book details, and when you look at related editions.
In your wishlist, you can set your "preferred Amazon store" for where you are in the world. This is set automatically to the likely country BM thinks you're in, but you can set it to whatever you like. Prices and links will be only to that specific Amazon store. A pleasant surprise is that (in my experience) books of all languages are widely available from all the Amazon used book stores.
You can hide used book prices by choosing "hide Amazon prices" in either your wishlist or save-for-later. The setting is "sticky" and applies throughout BookMooch.
On the book details page, a small note explains "this book is available for mooching, you don't need to buy it" when the book can be mooched.

There is one slightly odd thing about how the feature works, that I need to explain:

Amazon limits us to 2000 price lookups per hour
A price lookup takes about 2 seconds
Therefore, BookMooch cannot lookup prices "immediately" as you load a page. If BM did, we would (a) run out of our 2000 lookups per hour, and (b) slow every page down by 2 seconds (or worse, for wishlists and related editions)
So... every page which displays a price shows the most recent price we've obtained from Amazon.
If there is no price displayed, or the price is more than a day old, in the background we queue up a list of books we want new prices for.
Amazon does provide a complicated way for BM to lookup prices for 20 books at one time, so that BM is able to find prices for up to 40,000 books per hour, using this background technique.
So... if you load your wishlist up the first time, and see no prices, wait a minute, go back to it, and you should have prices filled out then. The same thing applies to the "book details" page.

For the future, I'm looking into including ABE Books prices into the mix, possibly a "low price" alert feature, and other possibilities.

This feature is very much a work in progress and will change as I figure things out and based on your feedback.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Export improvement

John Buckman — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 06:37:07 GMT

Export improvement

I've improved the "export" feature in the wishlist/savelater/inventory pages based on feedback on the forum.

Specifically:

the author and title are now listed in the export file

the file is tab-delimited, and will nicely import into excel

I tested exporting my wishlist, clearing it and re-importing, and found a number of places where a book wouldn't be reimported, such as books with ISBNs that start with "B" (from Amazon) and hand-entered books. I fixed all the problems I found and was able to export/clear/import a massive wishlist and not lose any books in the process.

The "export" feature is available in the pull down menu on the top right of the page.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Pub talk about customer happiness

John Buckman — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:43:14 GMT

Pub talk about customer happiness

I gave a talk recently at a pub in London:

I mention BookMooch briefly at the beginning, and talk mostly about the music business and Magnatune. However, the point I'm making applies equally to BookMooch : instead of buying books one at a time, on BM you become a member, and assuming that you are a "good moocher" and send away books on your existing bookshelf when you join, you'll have enough points that you can simply get books as you are interested, and as they are available.

Mooching contrasts with buying, in that with buying you tend to browse a lot, then whittle your choices down to a few, and then finally choose one or two books to buy, and take price into consideration. With mooching, the "price" has already been paid (you've sent books out in the past) and the only considerations are a) is the book available, and b) might I be interested in it?

Being a Moocher generally means you will forever have plenty to read, and is analogous to the "world of plenty" that is the Internet, compared to the world of "artificial scarcity" which is the traditional music/book world.

Anyhow... that's enough of me trying to be insightful in the morning (always a dangerous prospect). Back to my coffee and programming...

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

New feature: export

John Buckman — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 04:16:38 GMT

New feature: export

I've added an "export" feature to the inventory, wishlist, and save-for-later pages.

To use it, go to that page, and choose "Export your ...." from the pulldown menu on the top right.

Then, on the page which appears, click the link in the title that says "click here for your export file"

A plain text file will appear, with the ISBNs for every book on that list.

Choose "file/save as" in your web browser to save it to disk.

I've also reorganized and grouped the menu choices on the inventory, wishlist, and save-for-later pages. There was a lot there, they were a bit haphazardly "organized". Now, all the "show/hide" options are at the top in their own grouping.

Of course, it will take a little getting used to the new order of the menu items, but I hope you'll find it clearer.

I also removed the things in "settings" for inventory/wishlist/save-for-later that are also in the pulldown menu. For example, "show covers" is no longer in the settings, since you can toggle it with a pulldown menu choice. It seems cleaner to not have the same option appear in two different places, worded slightly differently in both places.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

New feature: best price

John Buckman — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:12:24 GMT

New feature: best price

I've been working on a new feature which allows you to easily track the best used price of books.

The first part of that feature is now up. When you add a book to your wishlist, a price search happens automatically. To see it in action, add this book Khaled Hosseini : A Thousand Splendid Suns to your wishlist. The price is refreshed only once per day, so it doesn't slow your use of the site down.

Note: Amazon is currently limiting us to 2000 price lookups per hour, which we are going over at times, so you might not see "best prices" for now, until I (hopefully) get Amazon to up our limit

BookMooch displays three different prices:

the best used price from anyone on Amazon
the best new price from anyone on Amazon
the price Amazon is charging for a new copy

Over the next few weeks, I'll be releasing more ways in which this price-tracking can be used.

Note that this already currently works with all the Amazon regional stores (France, Germany, Japan, Canada, UK)

As a basic example, if you look at the "most wishlisted" books and add them to your own wishlist, you'll see that many of them are available (in the USA) for less than $2.20, with postage costs included.

Given that Media Mail postage rates start at $2.38, it actually makes more financial sense to simply buy the book used from Amazon, than to pay to post your own book to another moocher.

I realize that there can be many reasons for wanting to send your books to others, but I don't think there's anything wrong with being informed, in knowing that this particular book would actually cost you more in mooching-out postage, then simply buying it from an Amazon merchant.

Many, many books are (you will find out) much more expensive on Amazon than if you mooch them. For example, this Mexican Cookbook I want costs $11.75 on Amazon. I'll wait to see if can mooch it, thank you.

I've only just started incorporating this "best price" feature into BookMooch. Some other places I think it'd be useful:

on your wishlist itself, so you can see if you should "just give up" waiting for a book you want to read, and just buy it, because it's available inexpensively. This could be another view, or an option in the wishlist settings.
on the book details page, so you can decide to buy the book instead of wishlisting it in the first place
possibly... after you add a book to your inventory, so that you can decide: "this book of mine sells for $60 on Amazon, I should probably sell it to my local used book store". This is perhaps a bit contentious, but I think overall it would help BookMooch, because a very common criticism I hear about listing books is "how do I know my books aren't valuable, and I'm mistakenly giving gems away that I should instead sell?". Well, BM could tell you, and if all your books are selling cheaply on Amazon, you might as well mooch them out instead. I think this would be off by default, but could be enabled as an option. Update: based on feedback below I will not be adding this feature.
historical tracking: after this price-tracking feature has been out for a while, I will be able to graph the historical price for a book, helping you decide whether the current price is a good deal or not.
email notifications: you could be emailed when a book on your wishlist is available under a threshold price. Perhaps when it can be bought for less than $2.50? Or perhaps you have wishlisted books that are normally really expensive, and if they are available for less than $20 you'd simply by them?
a "likelihood" feature: would you find it useful if your wishlist told you that you would be "likely" or "unlikely" to mooch this book in the next 3 months? This could be a simple automated analysis based on the number of people who want the book and the historical number of copies that have appeared in BM.
How about the opposite statistic: the likelihood anyone will mooch this book from you? Do we really need any more copies of Dan Brown : The Da Vinci Code being listed on BookMooch?
for people who hate this feature, I'll be added a setting in your "preferences" to turn it completely off. No prices will be displayed.
other ideas?

My general reasons for doing this feature are:

Many people use BM to save money: this should help them do that
My wishlist contains books I actually want to read. If they never appear on BM but I can get them cheaply, I'm happy buying them. In fact, for many of them, I'm happy buying them new if it's obviously hopeless expecting I'll be able to mooch them someday.
People hesitant to list books to give away might be more inclined if they were told the real value of most of their books
And of course, Amazon pays BM 8% on book sales, so this is a way to raise funds while providing a helpful feature.

I put this feature up before it's complete, in order to get a discussion going, and I'd love to know what you think!

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

'Mooch Gatherings' feature

John Buckman — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 09:43:40 GMT

'Mooch Gatherings' feature

I am getting ready to add a meet-in-the-real-world-and-exchange-books feature.

I'm struggling a bit for names to describe this feature. Some ideas I've had:

And would love suggestions (via the comments feature) of names for this.

As far as the feature goes, I'm thinking that it'll be a special kind of forum.

Namely, you'll be able to:

create a "gathering", specifying its time and place. This will create a dedicated forum for the gathering.
people can click an "attend" button, which joins them to the forum.
people can view the members of a forum, which in this case means they can see who will be attending the gathering
people can browse the inventories of others attending the gathering and send "ask first" requests other attendees to bring certain books with them. This will not mooch the book, but it will reserve the book for them, so others cannot mooch it. The reservation expires the day after the gathering.
each time someone clicks the "attend" button, a message will be auto-posted to the forum saying they're attending, with a link to their inventory (or maybe list their inventory, if it's under 100 books). In this way, you can keep on top of what books are available to you by attending this gathering.
gatherings occurring within 100 miles of you will automatically appear on your home page, so you're aware of what you could go to. You can opt out of seeing gatherings altogether, or shorten the distance you're willing to travel. With this feature, gatherings automatically notify likely attendees.
since the gathering feature is actually a forum, people can discuss the gathering and post messages to each other.

Other ideas?

I'm planning on having a Mooch Gathering in London in November, and then another one in San Francisco in January. By then, hopefully I'll have done a decent job with the feature and other moochers can run with it and have their own self-organized gatherings.

-john

My replies to some comments below:

Could it be possible to give an opportunity of take 100 miles or your country? Even in Germany or others there are not so much "Moocher", so someone like to go father than 100 mils.

It would be *much* easier programming-wise for me, if you were shown "Meet and Mooch" events in your Country (if not USA) or in your State (if USA or Canada). That might be how I do it on a first pass, just to save me work, as the "100 miles" idea is several days work.

How would this work? Would you have to set up one-to-one trades for the Meet and Mooch, or could you spend your BookMooch points there, if no one was interested in your inventory?

If you "reserve" a book from someone attending, they bring it with them. You look at it, and if you like it, you do a regular mooch. If you don't like it, you give it back to them and the next day the reservation is automatically canceled.

I also think people should bring books that they believe others _should_ be interested in, and they try (in person) to get others to mooch them.

Moochups sounds great! I love that there might be one in London in November - I'm based in London, so if you need any help organising that, give me a shout. I'm a PA by job, and work for a company with a media/news side, so could alert a lot of colleagues about it (part of the Green Team maybe).

Thanks, that would be very helpful.

I'm planning on having it at a friend's apartment in Covent Garden (central London), and can probably accommodate 50 people. My plan is for each person to bring a food or beverage, so we can mooch food off each other as well!

John Buckman
2 years ago

bigger hard disk for covers

John Buckman — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 11:07:42 GMT

bigger hard disk for covers

I installed a big, new hard disk today, and so BookMooch was down for two hours.

The reason: this is part of a larger project I have to get more and better book covers onto BookMooch.

Instead of sending your web browser to Amazon to view a book cover, I'm actually having BookMooch get its own book covers from several sites (LibraryThing and OpenLibrary are kindly providing their covers too). The reason for this is that there are tons of books that Amazon doesn't have book covers for -- I'm sure you've noticed that lots of BookMooch books don't have any cover graphics.

By getting covers onto a BookMooch-controlled hard drive, BookMooch can see which is the best quality book cover (or any at all) and point you to it, from the BookMooch web site.

We can also resize it to fit the page. I'd like to have book covers have the same width, so that pages like Search and Pending look a bit better and the column width doesn't fluctuate with varying cover image sizes.

More substantially, I want to have a "bookshelf cover browser" feature, so you can look at shelves of real book covers, and browse books visually, as you would at a good book store. To do that, BookMooch needs more covers, and needs to be able to resize them to fit.

So that's a background project I'm working on. It's a _lot_ of work. So far, I have collected a half million covers, but there's a lot more still to be done before I can "flip the switch" and start using our covers instead of Amazon's.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Wishlist bug fixes

John Buckman — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:52:49 GMT

Wishlist bug fixes

There were quite a few comments to the latest wishlist changes. I've made a few more fixes.

The highlights are:

you can now show up to 2000 books per page if you want to (up from 500)
BM user names in the title are now hyperlinked to their bio page on wishlists, inventory & pending page (this feature will be enabled in a few hours)
RSS feeds should now work
there is some confusion around the "Count all copies, not just moochable copies:" feature -- this feature should only be enabled by Angel moochers, I don't think it's generally useful for others
people with very large wishlists (over 1000), sorting by count, may experience a small sorting bug if their "books per page" is set small (say, 20 books per page). The workaround is to show 100 books-per-page if you have a very large wishlist.

Below, you'll find my replies (in detail) to your comments:

Can you make it so we can see more than 500 books per page? The 1,000 page had been loading fine for me, and now part of my wishlist is being cut off.

Done. You can now choose to display up to 2000 books at a time. If anyone needs to display more than that at a time, please leave a comment.

I would respectfully cast a vote for a quick link next to their name, if possible, as before, from inventory / wish-list page to member's bio page (always good when mooching to see status or global mooching conditions - i.e. they won't actually send to me *heh* quickly!!)

Good suggestion, thanks for that! I've now made the member name linked to their bio, displayed at the top of the inventory, wishlist and pending pages (when you're looking at another member, not for your own pages).

(man) I have the same problem as marmalade though - my save-for-later list, when sorted by author, shows copies for the next book below, when there isn't any. When I sort it by count it shows correctly, but when I sort it back by author it places the 2 on the book below - there is an available edition in between the listing which is correct - and nothing I do corrects this.

and

(from "marmalade) I sorted my "saved for later" page by count & then went to only moochable. The first book shows 15 copies & says that it is "Very Convenient Marriage"

lman and marmalade: you both have the setting enabled for "Count all copies, not just moochable copies:" -- thus the wishlist page will sometimes display a count that is larger than the number of actually moochable books. This is on purpose -- that's exactly what the setting is supposed to do.

I logged into both your accounts myself to test this, and the "count" in wishlist and save-for-later was correct when the setting for "Count all copies, not just moochable copies:" was unchecked, which is the default setting.

Okay, but what if I have a book on my wishlist and I want to move it to my save-for-later? Maybe I'm weird, but I do that a lot. In the old days, there was a button in the wishlist to move a book to the save-for-later (Right? Have I lost my mind?); but now, the only way I could think to do it was to go to the book's page, add it to my save-for-later list, go back into my wishlist, then remove it from my wishlist. Four clicks where there used to only be one. Not as convenient. Similarly, I'm guessing the same would happen for books on our save-for-later lists that we'd like to move to our wishlists.

Unfortunately, this one task that now takes two clicks. You're right, you now need to click on the book, and then choose "move to save-for-later" on the book details page.

I know this is less easy than before, but this is (I believe) an infrequent thing for most people, and previously this meant that every book had a "save-for-later" button on every book, even though they rarely used it. I'm sorry, but that button got sacrificed for simplicity's sake. You can still do what you describe, but it's now an extra click.

ETA: and I can't get my RSS feed from my wish-list to show a heading - it just says 'viewing feed' and then doesn't work.
My RSS wishlist does not seem to be working (when I click on the orange icon). Thanks so much for all your hard work!!!

and

(dova113) I'm having a problem with RSS for my wishlist. When I click on the orange button, I get a blank page with only the heading with subscription option.

I hope that this is fixed for you now. The problem was caused by non-english characters not being accepted "unencoded" by certain RSS readers. Google Chrome quite helpfully gave a "parse error" at exactly the point where the problem was.

(alilee) There seems to be a problem with sorting by count if you have the wishlist on several pages. If I set my wishlist to 20 lines per page and then hit sort by count only one books is shown as available at the top of the first page. A second one is shown as available at the top of the second page. Setting it to show the whole wishlist on one page brings them both up to the top.

and

(carod) Mostly loving all the changes. The only thing I would improve is to have either the sort by "count" or the "show moochable now" show all the available books at the top, not just the ones from that page. I have a big wishlist and have to go page by page to see which ones are available.

If you have a very large wishlist (over 1000), any many of the books have copies available (but not moochable to you) and you have a small page size, then this can happen. This bug only happens when those 3 cases happen. The easiest work-around is to have a larger page size, such as 100, and then this problem won't effect you. This bug is simply a limitation I had to put in place for sorting by Count -- the first internal sorting pass is actually done using the total number of copies (and not moochable copies), because BM needs to be fast in sorting thousands of books, and the approach I took works correctly (and quickly) in almost all cases.

I love it - works great. Now can you make the inventory work like that?

Sorry, I don't understand, I thought the inventory page did now work like the wishlist page? If you want something specific on the inventory page that is currently on the wishlist page, can you tell me specifically what you mean?

Where do I find the "settings" button to increase the number of books shown at one time?

Look at the top right of the Wishlist page, for a pulldown menu that says "### Books" on it. Toward the bottom of that pulldown is the word "Settings" -- choose that.

When I change the settings on "save for later", it ALSO changes settings on "wishlist". I want related editions hidden for "save for later". I do NOT want them hidden for wishlist! They are seperate lists with seperate functions, used for seperate things. PLEASE go back to how it used to be, they should have SEPERATE settings! I really don't mean to sound ungrateful, because I'm VERY VERY happy about the most recent wishlist changes. But I've posted about this multiple times in all the other recent-changes thread and it hasn't even been mentioned, I have no idea if John has even noticed.

I'm sorry, but that's not a bug, it's how I designed it. I didn't think it was user-friendly for most people to have to click "show related editions" on 3 separate pages (inventory/wishlist/save-for-later). My hunch is that for most people, they either like to see related editions or they don't, and they'd like BookMooch to operate in that way.

As a shortcut, you can bookmark (in your web browser) the url that results from your choosing "hide related editions" or "show related editions" for your wishlist/save-for-later, and in the future, you can go to it directly from that bookmark. If you do this: I believe the wishlist and save-for-later will operate the way you specifically want : that's one reason I made the URLs at BM bookmarkable.

I love all the changes...will there be a time when those that are moochable but not to our country will not show up. That is the only thing I can see at this time that I would love. Thanks for all the work you are putting in to making all of us happy

That _is_ how it currently works. If you are being shown books with a "count" more than 1 in your wishlist/save-for-later, and they're NOT moochable, it's because you have chosen to enable the setting for "Count all copies, not just moochable copies:". Please uncheck that setting and the count will accurately reflect books you can actually mooch.

That "Count all copies, not just moochable copies:" setting was put there for Angel moochers, and if you're not doing Angel mooches, it's probably not useful to have it checked.

the changes are wonderful and i am thankful for them! i do have one question/problem that most likely has a simple answer that i am over looking.
maybe someone can answer it for me--- on my wishlist and save-for-later list i have several books that say there are several copies of the book with NO RED MOOCH button next to it, i click on the book and it says there are no books available. on some other books that have a number next to it with NO RED MOOCH button when i click on the book name it says that there are several available copies for mooching. i thought the number indicated the number of books available?

Can you tell me exactly which books on your wishlist and save-for-later lists are behaving in this way?

on my wishlist If I show 2000 books my list on the first page only goes into the 'F's' - Greg Farshtey and the next page starts with Fumi Yoshinaga. Is this a sort issue or a lot of books getting skipped in my list?

That was a bug, and I've fixed it.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Wishlist page updated

John Buckman — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:03:25 GMT

Wishlist page updated

I've updated the Wishlist page today with the latest features from your feedback:

2) moochable books now have a big red "mooch" button on the right, so you can see them easily. There is also a "Moochable now" pull down menu choice that will only show moochable books.

3) the basic view only shows author, title and count of (truly) moochable books. A "show more details" drop down menu choice shows date added, publisher, date published and binding.

4) lots of usability improvements from the feedback. The dropdown menus for each book are now gone, replaced with text commands like "remove" in square brackets. Also, removing one or all related editions is now very clear and just a single click.

Plenty of little things like:

2) you can search your wishlist, and perform any operation on the subset of books that your search matches

3) all the little things that the Inventory page also now has

John Buckman
2 years ago

Inventory page updated

John Buckman — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:54:04 GMT

Inventory page updated

I've put up a new version of the Inventory page today.

Here's what's different:

1) 20 books are shown at once, by default. You can choose to show more in the "settings," which are then permanent. This should help everyone with slow connections who were having trouble with the large pages.

2) there are next/previous buttons, both at the bottom of the page, and in the pull down menu at the top right

3) "author" is now the 1st column ("title" is 2nd), and the default sort

4) the pull-down menu on each book has been removed, and a simple "remove" text command is there now. The two options per book that were there were a) "book details" (which you can get to now by clicking on the book itself), and "amazon" (which you can get to from the book details page). The pull-down menu does appear on books that you have more than one copy of, since there are additional command options (remove dupes, etc) for those.

5) when you're looking at another person's inventory, there are no buttons at all. I hope you'll find this much cleaner to look at.

6) the "date added" column is no longer displayed on the simple view of your inventory. Instead, it is visible in the "show more detail" page.

7) author sort is by last name, and the author's last name is Italicized so you can easily locate their last name, and see how the sort works.

8) the inventory page should load very quickly now

This new page the result of another 5 days of refining, and responding to the comments on the blog.

Next, I'm working on doing the same to the wishlist/save-for-later pages. This will take me a few days.

-john

Some replies to the comments below:

I noticed another side effect. In the inventory page, the author field appears empty when the author of a book is in greek letters. The title field in greek letters works fine.

Whoops, sorry about that. I'll fix this -- it was prompted by a different feature request (ignoring accented characters) which has this unfortunate (and unacceptable) side effect.

Previously when a book was requested it remained on one's inventory with a send tag, now it seems to be removed and only appear on the pending list.

You're right, it used to do that. Let me look into reinstating that particular feature.

is it possible to add an export feature to the inventory page?

If you "save page as&" in your web browser, that functions as an export. You can import that HTML document back into BookMooch in the future, as it scans the HTML for ISBN numbers. I use this trick all the time while testing.

How much longer until we can view all of our books in the wishlist?

A few more days: this is really hard, complicated programming work, and it has to work right in many varied circumstances. It took five very full days to do this latest round of changes to the inventory page.

Is there a simple way to determine if a book is hard cover?

Yes: click on the "show more details" pull down menu choice, and a "Binding" column will permanently appear when you look at anybody's inventory.

I have a large inventory. You used to have "See all" tab so that you could search through you own or anyone else's inventory. But I don't see it anymore. Can you add the "View All" button back?

You can view all your inventory on one page : go to "settings" and choose "500" as the number of books to show per page.

I removed the "view all" button, because if you have 30,000 books in your inventory, "view all" would crash your browser. This is a better way, I think.

I've made some more changes to the "inventory" page today (October 14), based on the most recent comments.

These issues are all fixed now:

pending (unsent) books need to appear in inventory

greek authors didn't display

(re)sorting of searching in inventory results didn't work

pull down menu should display correct count of books (sometimes didn't)

Now I'm back to working on wishlists...

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

More wishlist changes

John Buckman — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:18:39 GMT

More wishlist changes

I managed to hit most of the my to-do list for the wishlists today. Here's the run-down of the changes:

there is a new setting for "show covers" which works both in wishlists and inventory. It's not yet very elegant, but it does the job. Thanks to "vivir" for showing me a prototype of this idea. I'll be making this work nicer in the future.

The "sort order" on tables is now remembered. If you sort your wishlist books by author, then they will always come that way by default.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get the next/previous page feature done, as that turns out to be a lot more work than I expected when your wishlist is very large. I first need to make the pages load much faster for everyone, which I worked on. They're a bit faster now, but need a lot more improvement, methinks.

For those of you who have the "allow multiple copies" feature enabled for your inventory (that setting is in your profile), a few things now appear. A "count" column now appears in your inventory if you show all book details. There are also now "remove dupes of this book" and "remove all dupes" commands in the main pull down menu.

Very large wishlists and inventories: currently only the first 1000 books on your wishlist/inventory are displayed. This is my top priority to fix, but I'm afraid you'll have to live with it as it is now for about 10 days.

Some bugs fixed:

Some of the not-quite-right sorting by author's last name should be fixed now.

"Only show moochable" didn't show some related editions in some cases. This is fixed.

Some replies to comments:

1) re: jacquie and infiniteletters -- I've confirmed that your wishlists now work, but they are limited to just 1000 books from your wishlists.

2) re: cara -- yes, probably the reason the book you're looking for isn't showing up on the page is because BM is taking an arbitrary 1000 books from your wishlist. My apologies, I'm working on this, but you'll have to live with it as it is for about 10 days.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Changes from all the feedback

John Buckman — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:46:19 GMT

Changes from all the feedback

I've made a bunch of changes to the wishlist and inventory pages, thanks to all the helpful feedback I received on my previous blog posting.

Here is what has changed on the wishlist page:

there is a new "settings" page where a few different options can be set. (see below)

A new setting for "Count all copies, not just moochable copies" allows angel-moochers (and others) to get a count of all the copies of the books on their wishlist, not just those that they personally can mooch.

A new setting for "Automatically display related editions" allows you to turn off the new feature which automatically shows related editions in your wishlist.

font size: the size of the type is now the same as on the rest of the BM site, which is to say it's bigger than before. However, on the settings page you can now choose any font size from small to xxlarge. The setting applies to all the table views. I think this will help those with less-than-perfect eyesight, but also help those with big monitors and sharp eyesight.

New menu item: "show only moochable" only shows the books that you can mooch. This seems to work right most of the time, but I just noticed a small bug where it didn't show moochable related editions -- I'll fix that bug tomorrow.

I really liked ctrl-clicking to open books on my wishlist or inventory into a new browser tab. That wasn't previously possible with the new table view, but now it is. To make it possible, I had to remove the feature that you could click "just anywhere" on the row -- you now need to click on text on a row (just like every other page on the web). I think this is an acceptable compromise.

Only the first 1000 items on your wishlist will be displayed. This is a temporary measure to help people with very large wishlists continue to use them (you can use "wishlist search" to find books", until I add a next/previous page mechanism, which I hope to tomorrow.

Here is what has changed on the inventory page:

there is a new "settings" page where a few different options can be set. (see below)

there is a new "show all book details" setting which then has the table show condition notes, binding, publisher, and publication date. This is very similar to how the "show details" feature worked on the previous version of the inventory page, which the exception that the book cover is not shown in this version. I plan on doing a special "book cover browser" in the future that will address that.

Only the first 1000 items on your inventory will be displayed. This is a temporary measure to help people with very large inventory continue to use them (you can use "inventory search" to find books", until I add a next/previous page mechanism, which I hope to tomorrow.

I hope this addresses most of the problems people have had with the new inventory and wishlist pages. Please post any comments of things that you'd like to see further changed.

-john

Here is my reply to the questions below (Saturday morning):

Is there a way to keep the ones that will not send to our country off the moochable list as well??

That is how it works. The "moochable count" is a exact count of copies you actually can mooch.

I'd like a link to the member's Bio page from their Inventory page.

It's there, on the pull down menu, when you look at someone else's inventory. Look for "View their bio"

Also I was wondering if there is a way to set our inventories and wishlists to the form we want and save it so that each time we come in we dont have to go through changing it. I like my lists to be by author in alphabetical order and would also like to be able to have it stay that way when I click moochable copies. Any possibilities???

Yes, that's quite possible and in fact is where I'm moving too. You may notice that the other "settings" are saved and permanent (such as font size, show count of all copies, etc...) It's on my todo list.

Still think that an inventory should be alphabetized by author's last name, not by the book title. Listing books alphabetically by book title is insanely counter intuitive.

What do other people think? I don't have an opinion, myself, and I'm happy to put author in as the 1st column, and make it the default sort.

It's not for the wishlist or inventory pages, but I've been meaning to mention it and it's occured to me now so here goes. I'd really love for, when searching for a book, all the editions of one book to be grouped under that title (so instead of seeing 10 different editions, you'd just see the title). Most of the time, people don't care about the specific edition and it would be far more convenient to have all the books on one page rather than having to open all the pages separately and review all the condition notes etc. individually. Obviously there would have to be a button somewhere to split into editions again for when it does matter, though.

I'm slowly redoing how lists-of-books are shown on BookMooch, and the search results will eventually get the same treatment as wishlist and inventory. As you can see, related editions in wishlists do show related editions, and they are grouped together, and that's how search results will work too.

The font size of the tables being the same as the rest of the site is great, and wow, an extra bonus for even larger fonts (I've set it on xlarge).

My plan is for the "font size" setting to eventually make its way through all of BookMooch, so that those with poor eyesight can make it bigger, yet all the information will fit nicely on the page (something that doesn't always work when you use the web browser's "larger fonts" feature)

I'm always on a constant battle of compromise with Mozilla Firefox in keeping the tabs (Browse, Add, Inventory, etc... Member Home) at the top large enough in font to tell what they are (at least recognize the word shape without reading every letter) without losing them off the right of the page (forcing scrolling to the right), while keeping the font size of the main site readable. But since I know what they are it's okay for now. Keep up the good work.

That's a good point, I do agree that the top level tabs are quite small. The only "solution" for you for now, is to your browser's zoom feature ("+" on Firefox) which makes everything larger.

I suppose I'll get used to it, but I still really dislike the drop-down on the wishlist. It's annoying, it's an extra step, and it LOOKS ridiculous to have that big blank space when it's not actively in use. I really don't understand the change, either. What was *wrong* with the simple, effective buttons? Did people actually complain about them, or is this just something you thought would be nicer? The buttons were easier. More intuitive.

The "problem" with the buttons is that they are visually very noisy, repeating the same thing (mooch, details, amazon) on every book. All that visual stimuli makes it harder to read the most important thing on the page, which is the book information.

I agree that simple buttons are "more intuitive", but with 3 buttons for each book, that's a lot of noise.

Also, there are new features I wanted to add to the wishlist, that required more buttons. For example, when showing related editions, there are now "hide this related edition" buttons on each related edition. So, yet another button on every line, and those books's buttons won't align, which draws your eyes to them, drawing them away from the useful information.

I agree that the pull down navigation on each book is not ideal, but I think that a button for every possible action on every book is too busy. Also, a major consideration for web site designers these days is making your site work with touch based devices (iPad, iPhone, Android), and the pull down menus work fairly well there.

Amazon uses a roll-over-the-cover navigation system in some places, to deal with similar problems. I don't like that, because it's not clear the navigation is there, and it doesn't work at all with touch-based web browsing.

If you can suggest another user interface element, which keeps visual noise down to a minimum, I'd be happy to consider it.

I need to remove several books from my wishlist and as far as I can tell, the page still has to load between each book removal. This takes far too long as I am one of those folks with a huge wishlist

I do plan on fixing that particular issue with some javascript magic, but it'll take me some time to get to that. I agree, reloading after each deletion is no good, and since pretty much every table page has a "remove" feature, this needs to be a fast operation to perform.

John, help please?! I'm trying to remove a book I just added to my inventory as the condition isn't as good as I thought it was, and it is not removing despite clicking on remove on the book detail page several times.

Can you contact tech support about that problem?
http://bookmooch.com/m/email_support

I can't get the 1000 version of my wishlist to load after waiting several minutes... Is it a memory problem where BM is trying to load the whole thing before showing any, or just my browser? I know it was possible to load the whole page before the changes, although it did require waiting.

I'm not able to load your wishlist either (26,000 books). I'll get that fixed today.

Can't comment on the changes, as I can no longer load my wishlist. Yesterday I could see my wishlist - very slow, today can't load it at all. Are the pages too long to load in a reasonable time? I'm on slow broadband (we'll never get anything faster out here), but there are plenty of people still on dial-up. Country dwellers use this site too ;-)

Jacquie, I'm able to load your wishlist:
jacquie

so it's not a BM side problem. However, the page is very large (you have 3581 books on your wishlist) and 1000 books are displayed at a time.

I'm working on that particular problem today, and hopefully will be able to get it done.

Speaking of making mistakes, any chance of instead of just saying "removed book" the screen says WHICH book has been removed as it did previously? I know me. I'm going to accidentally remove something I still wanted on the wishlist and then not remember what the title was that I accidentally removed. The nice "refresh" button would minimize these mistakes also.

I'm thinking of having an "X" button next to each book that doesn't cause the page to reload, which should solve both your "what book did I delete" problem, and the speed issue.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

Wishlist & Inventory redone

John Buckman — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 09:44:04 GMT

Wishlist & Inventory redone

The wishlist, save-for-later and inventory pages have been completely rewritten.

There are quite a few new things on the "Wishlist" page:

the real number of moochable copies is displayed in a column. This takes into account "will not send to your country" and "reserved" copies. Those are real moochable copies.
related editions are automatically included, and shown if there are any moochable copies. They are shown with red text, the words "(related edition)", as well as the binding, edition, publisher and title (if it's different). With this feature, you can now easily see if there are related editions you actually want, and that are actually available to you. You shouldn't need to add every edition of a book to your wishlist. Coming soon: LibraryThing is sharing with me their excellent related-edition data, so this feature will soon get even more accurate.
you can hide any specific related edition of any wishlist book. For example, if translated versions of a book on your wishlist are available (and you don't want them), you can choose "hide this related edition". The wishlist email notifications similarly will not notify you of moochable related editions that you've hidden.
you can choose to hide all related editions for a single book on your wishlist. Email notifications will honor this as well.
there is now a column displaying how long ago you added the book to your wishlist
you can sort by any column, including books with moochable copies, as well as how long ago you added the book to your wishlist
you can search a wishlist, and only the subset of books matching your search are shown. Very, very handy for seeing if you have a book already on your wishlist
there is no "next page" feature any longer: all the books on your wishlist are shown on one page. This should work better for most people, except those who have truly massive wishlists. If this becomes a problem, I can implement a next/previous page feature, but my tests found that the new wishlist page can display many more books on a page, and uses about 1/2 as much memory per book. I'm hoping most of you will prefer having all your wishlist books on one page.
The wishlist page now uses the new "table view", with gray shading, easy hover-over-a-book-and-click selecting of lines, and a much more minimal, uncluttered aesthetic. There are pull down menus with all the possible actions which replace the multitude of buttons which sprouted from the previous design.
all these above features are also available with the "save for later" feature.

The "Inventory" page:

The inventory page now uses the new "table view".
You can sort by any column, including how long ago you added the book to your inventory.

The "Pending" page:

My current plan is to continue displaying everything on one page, but offer a pull down menu to optionally "filter" the page to only show books-you-need-to-send, books-you're-receiving, etc...
I think that will be the best compromise between the everything-on-one-page approach, which works best for the majority of moochers (who don't have tons going on), but will still accommodate (and improve) the experience of high volume moochers.

Why these features now?

So... if you appreciate all the new features, please click "Give a Little" and send a small amount to support BookMooch. I'm completely unpaid: the money goes 100% to infrastructure, bandwidth, and other costs.

On a totally different topic, I've been working 14h days to get this done, and on Sunday am taking a mini-celebration and going for a 4 day driving holiday around Northern England. I'll be around the next few days to fix any big problems with the new features, and then will come back fresh & rested to tackle the pending page!

-john

Below is my first pass at answering the questions raised in the comments:

My wishlist won't load...it is rather large, but it loaded just fine before the change...?

I can load it up in Firefox:
AZLori

what web browser & OS are you using?

You do have 1200 books on it, so that may be larger than your web browser can handle.

I think I will have to add a next/previous page feature at perhaps 500 books.

Like Cereusy said, the sort by author sorts by first name, not last. Can that be changed?

Yes, I'll be doing that.

There appears to be many people who like the new wishlist hiding books that they can't mooch, but there are also many people who dislike that. Perhaps if you added an option in the profile?

The new system shows you a count of moochable copies by you, but you're right, it doesn't show you the # of copies available somewhere in the world. I can put an option in to have the "count" show # of copies in BM, and not "moochable" copies.

Also, I cannot see the condition notes books in the owner's inventory anymore.

To see condition notes, you have to try to mooch a book, and then each copy shows the condition notes.

re: infiniteletters

You have 26,501 books on your wishlist. That's way, way more than a web browser can handle on one page. Sorry about that -- I will add a next page/previous page feature for you, because there's no way the new page can handle this many books on one web page.

There's also no way to see cover, condition notes, binding, etc for multiple books on the inventory page.

It's true, I made it so that you have to click to see the cover & binding. The condition notes only appear when you try to mooch. Is this a common need?

HATE the change to the inventory page. As the person who mooches large numbers of books a month for a charity, this new change makes it almost impossible for me to find and mooch the books we need. Browsing is much more difficult and requires many more clicks to find anything. Really really need the sort by author feature to be by last name which will help my searches.
Do not like it for my personal account either. I will probably be using it less.

Besides the sort-by-author's-last name missing, can you be more specific about what you hate about it? I can't fix it if you just tell me you hate it -- I need to know specifically what features are missing/changed that "make it almost impossible for me to find and mooch the books we need"

One problem for me...some of the books don't have the remove option in the dropdown list. Most of the books do have this, but on certain ones, there are only 3 options, and the remove one is completely missing. I used the hide feature instead because that was an action I could do, and now I don't know how to find the ones I've hidden.

That's because those books are "related editions" and are marked as such on that row. That's why you can't "remove" them, because they're no in your wishlist, they're related to a book in your wishlist. Make sense?

And I must agree with the above comment that date of listing to inventory is irrelevant.

This feature was frequently requested last week (and previously, too) when I solicited comments.

Three uses for knowing when a book was added:

1) when looking at someone else's inventory, perhaps someone you look at regularly, you can see what books they've recently added

2) when looking at your own inventory, you can see what books you added last week, perhaps to find a book

3) on the wishlist, to see what books you've been waiting a long time for, so perhaps you should just go and buy it, because it doesn't seem to become available on BM

I see that if there are no moochable copies of a book, the 0 is in a lighter font. If one is available, the 1 is bolded. I appreciate that, but I wonder if the 1 (or 2, or whatever) could be even more salient. Could it be red, or in a larger font, or something? I have a long wishlist and an even longer Save for Later list. I like to log in briefly, scan the lists to see if anything new has popped up, and if not, log back out

You can click the "Count" column header, and your wishlist page will automatically sort by the number of moochable copies of books available. In other words, the books you can mooch will be at the top.

articles (a,an,the) should always be IGNORED when alphabetizing book titles. For example, THE BARTERED BRIDE and A BACHELOR TAKES A WIFE would both be listed under B. It is terrible to see that long row of THE books on my inventory or wishlist.

Good suggestion, will do.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Wishlist, Inventory & pending pages to be improved

John Buckman — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:38:51 GMT

Wishlist, Inventory & pending pages to be improved

Next on my major todo list is to redo the wishlist, inventory and pending pages.

The main reasons for working on them are:

- over the past 4 years, all these pages have accumulated more and buttons and functionality. They're cluttered.

- the ability to sort books by author/title/date-added is frequently requested

- large numbers of books occur frequently on these pages, and it can be tedious to handle them with the current way things work.

I developed a new kind of "table view" for BookMooch for the forums section. You can see it on this page:
http://bookmooch.com/m/forums_all

This "table view" allows:
1) easy re-sorting
2) filtering the view with a drop-down menu
3) using the drop-down menu as a replacement for navigation buttons (thereby reducing clutter)

My intent is to use the technology behind the "all forums" page on the wishlists, inventory and pending pages.

I'd love to have any feedback you have on this idea, and any things you like, dislike or want to see changed or added to how the table view works.

On the pending page, my intent is:

1) to separate the "you are receiving" things from the "you need to
send" things, moving them onto separate pages. It'll be another click, but it will keep things tidier.

2) to remove most of the details about each pending item from the overview page. Instead, you click on the book title on the table, and a new page appears with all the mooch transaction details. This should make the overview easier to read, to show more pending items (and let you sort by recipient, author name, or whatever) and allows me to show all the pending details rather than somewhat arbitrarily hiding some of the details.

I'd also love to hear any suggestions about other improvements to how these pages could change. I'll be working on the wishlist page first, because that's the easiest.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

location data: should BM share it?

John Buckman — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:48:31 GMT

location data: should BM share it?

While fixing the Recent Books feed on Twitter, I came across an interesting idea: each book being given away could be associated with its physical location in the world. This would make possible:

you would be able to view a google map of your area, and see what books are available near to you.
I could pass this location info to the "recent books" feed, and Twitter will automatically show where the book is on a map.
A "books near me" page could be made, showing books within 50 miles/km from your home. It could be a list, or it could be a map.
If you're traveling somewhere, you could see if there are BM members nearby that you could mooch from, thereby avoiding postage.
This would promote "mooching nearby" which would be carbon-friendly.

Sound super, right?

Well... I have major privacy concerns with this idea, which is why I haven't done it yet. I'm bringing this up in a blog posting, so I can get your feeling about these issues.

Here are some approaches I could take:

Make it opt-in: only people who want location associated with their books would have that happen. However, probably very few people would bother to opt in.
Make it an approximate location. Like old-style GPSes, I could add 10 miles/km of "uncertainty" to the location. This is my favorite solution so far, as BM members are already identified by their city and "within 10 miles" is probably good enough for these uses.
Make it approximate and opt-out, so people can choose to have not even a vague location of the books available.
other ideas?

What do you think?

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

"Recent Books" fixed

John Buckman — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:38:13 GMT

"Recent Books" fixed

I have fixed the "Recent Books" page at BookMooch:
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent

The feature broke three weeks ago when Twitter changed how their "user authentication" worked, and I needed to do some programming to support the new way Twitter worked.

Sorry about the delay!

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

My presentation in Helsinki

John Buckman — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 09:02:36 GMT

My presentation in Helsinki

The presentation I gave in Helsinki last week is now up on the Internet, if you want to watch it:

ARTtech 2010: BookMooch: never buy a book again from AssemblyTV on Vimeo.

John Buckman
2 years ago

In Helsinki and Stockholm

John Buckman — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:48:44 GMT

In Helsinki and Stockholm

I'm spending the summer in Stockholm, and visiting Helsinki this weekend to speak at the "Assembly" http://assembly.org conference (giving a talk on BM on Saturday)

There is a Helsinki meetup of moochers this Thursday:
Finnish moochers get-together / Suomalaisten BookMooch-k�ytt�jien tapaaminen

I'm thinking of doing a Stockholm moochers meetup in a few weeks too.

Long-time moochers may remember that 3 years ago, BookMooch was having serious technical problems (like, crashing all the time, and losing book swaps) and so three years ago I came to Stockholm for 6 weeks to focus entirely on those technical problems, and indeed did manage to fix them.

There aren't big tech problem with BookMooch any more, but I am here in Stockholm to work on BookMooch again, as I find that "getting away from everything" for a bit is a great way to find the focus to work on big stuff.

I have more small fixes to do for BM, and a few larger features I want to add (such as other book sources besides Amazon, finally get good topics, get the book covers to appear more often, and more). These are planned for the next few weeks, along with some holiday time...

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

re: small improvements

John Buckman — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:02:24 GMT

re: small improvements

There were lots of comments to my recent blog entry small improvements so I thought I'd respond to all of them here with a new blog entry.

Love the label idea but, what would make it even better is if you could print the labels for all books you've accepted with one click and format so that several go on one page rather then use a sheet of paper for each one.

That's a great idea. The only tricky bit is that I don't know where your "page break" is, so some labels will "page wrap" from one page to the next (1/2 the label on one page, 1/2 on the other) which is not so good. The solution is for me to make a PDF for you, but that's a lot more technically demanding for me. There is a "page break" command for HTML, but IE doesn't support it (it works in Firefox).

Related problem: Mysterious Press-published books with an ISBN beginning 999 are being given a variety of countries instead of languages for "Published in". For example, 9994135600 is "Armenia", and 9994698648 is "Nepal".

Thanks for pointing that out, and giving me specific examples. I'll work on fixing that.

I am not happy about the removal of the "reserve for friends" button. Is there anyway you can add buttons or something that would provide a list of my friends so I can add them to the "reserve" box with only a few clicks?

vs:

Bless your hearts for ditching the "just your friends" option, which made it seem so easy to be exclusionary... the opposite of everything BookMooch encourages!

What I'm planning on doing is having an "add a member" button to the reserve function, which lets you easily find members by name/email/userid, and add them one at a time. Your friends would also be listed there. This is how the "add an administrator" feature works with the forums.

I think the problem with "reserve for friends" before was that it was the 1st choice, and thus pushed people to most often reserve for friends, whereas it probably should be used sparingly, when appropriate, rather than as the default. So... my plan is to leave the reserve feature as it is now (as you to specify the member(s) to reserve it for) but make the user interface for adding members easier, and list the friends there. Seems like a reasonable compromise, agreed?

I was wondering why my copy of The Road printed in Nigeria only has US price markings on it.

and:

I noticed when I posted one of my books by ISBN it didn't list the author. I removed it and hand typed the information but it still didn't print author's name. I think it would be good to know who wrote a book. thanks.

Can you provide an ISBN or URL to the book that shows your problem? I can't look into the problem otherwise.

The next problem to address is dormant accounts. If a person hasn't logged onto bookmooch for a year or more, why is her/his account still active?

Indeed, that is next on my list to work on. The plan is to auto-vacation accounts that aren't logged into for 3 months.

re: Logging on/off. All I do to log off is close down that window. Computer dinosaur that I am, is there something else I should do to leave the site?

The dinosaur approach is exactly correct: the easiest way to log off is to close your web browser.

you will find some time to fix the search in non-latin characters, like greek.It is something that used to work but has stopped and now it is impossible to search if a greek book is available or list it in the wishlist.

Sorry about that, I do have that on my list of things to fix: it's very, very trick to get searching working for all languages.

In the meantime, you can find books with non-english characters using the book's ISBN code.

-john

John Buckman
2 years ago

small improvements

John Buckman — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:33:11 GMT

small improvements

I've been making a number of small improvements over the past week, and wanted to blog a few of them so that you know what's changed.

New features:

a new "label" button appears on the pending page, for books you haven't yet sent. This is a simple mailing label that you can print out, with your From: address, and the recipients To: address.

when you cancel a mooch, you now have the option to automatically add that book to your wishlist. The common use for this is if the person you mooched it from is not responding, you probably want to cancel and be notified when the book is available again.

when someone rejects your mooch request, the email you receive telling you this is the case includes a link to automatically add that book to your wishlist, for the same reason as above.

Changes:

the "send a reminder" feature now keeps track of each reminder, and shows you (in the pending page) how many days ago you sent it.

For the "mark as lost" and "mark as received" buttons, you have to wait 6 weeks (or 4 months if international) after sending the book before you can use that feature. Now, if you click the button it will tell you exactly how many days are left before you can use that feature.

a message is displayed in red when someone goes to send a reminder and it hasn't yet been a week. The message explains that they should probably wait a few more days before sending the reminder.

the maximum reservation days for a book is now 14 days. Previously, it could be as long as "forever". All reservations that were more than 14 days from today have now been reset to be in 14 days (August 9th). The reason for this was that long reservations are rarely needed, and unnecessarily tie books up.

You can no longer reserve a book for all your friends. The reason for this was that this was a feature we received lots of complaints about. You can still reserve a book for one or more members, so the ability to reserve for your friends is still there, but now you have to name them. The idea is to discourage reserving a book for your friends unless you really, really have to.

Bug fixes:

Books entered into BookMooch with 13 digit ISBN codes were incorrectly being shown as "Nigerian". This has been fixed, and the language is now set correctly for 13 digit ISBNs.

the "next page" button on advanced search has for a long time not remembered all the parameters of your search. That's now fixed.

I *hope* I've finally fixed the "recent books" page occasionally not updating. It's a tricky bug to fix, so we'll see if I finally licked it.

that's it for now... more coming soon.

John Buckman
2 years ago

BookMooch bookmarks now available

John Buckman — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:32:53 GMT

BookMooch bookmarks now available

I'm sending out BookMooch : Box of 500 BookMooch Bookmarks. I have a few hundred boxes of these, so there should be plenty.

and I have 7 remaining BookMooch : Box of 1000 BookMooch hand-out cards left.

Many more people want the cards than I have available, so if you want some you can search for moochcards and find smaller quantities of the cards than a box of 1000 cards.

I'm only sending bookmarks and cards out to people who "give a little", which you can do at http://bookmooch.com/m/give_a_little

Each box costs about $20 to print, plus another $5 to ship. Since BookMooch doesn't make money, the cost is covered by voluntary donations, by people who "give a little".

If you don't want to "give a little" but still wants bookmarks, you can mooch smaller quantities of them by searching for moochmarks.

About a year ago, I blogged about the high cost of these, and the general consensus among mooch users was that printing costs were a high cost given how much money BookMooch gets in donations. So, that means that once these cards and bookmarks are gone, I won't likely be printing any more.

To save money, I'm only sending these to USA moochers, but there are smaller quantities available in other countries from other members directly.

John Buckman
2 years ago

Downtime fun

John Buckman — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:57:42 GMT

Downtime fun

I was very amused by this conversation at the LibraryThing BookMooch forum http://www.librarything.com/topic/93148

They ask the question:

You know you are addicted to Bookmooch when....

when you search out books coming out in 2011 and add them to your wishlist.
You can't go to bed until you check your Wishlist one more time.
you check the rss feed on your potty run in the middle of the night
Feel lost & not sure what to do when BM is down.
You list your postal clerks among your best friends.
You get your boss to add BM to her list of "work appropriate" websites so you don't get in trouble for checking your wishlist at work...
You put BM-shipping before paying bills.
You "accidentally" leave Bookmooch bookmarks in the library books you return, in hopes of getting "converts" (who will add to the variety of books available) ;-)
Your friends tell you that they should give you Frequent Flyer Miles at the Post Office.
Instead of reading at the airport between planes, you cruise through the book store to see if there's anything interesting you should add to your wishlist.
The mail box holds your tax return check, but no books, so you are disappointed...

Those are my favorites answers: anyone have more? How many of these are you guilty of? I'm counted six for myself (and I do feel guilty about cruising book stores at airports for future mooches)

ps:
Yesterday, BookMooch was unavailable for about 2 hours. Every once in a while, some robot (or something) pounds the heck out of the site and causes a problem. I'm working on figuring these things out, but the reality is that every once in a while, BookMooch is down for a few hours. Sorry!

John Buckman
2 years ago

Forums now easier to follow

John Buckman — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:06:25 GMT

Forums now easier to follow

The main complaint I've heard about the forums is that it's too hard to keep up to date with them.

Today, I've put up a new version of the forum feature which:
1) tracks when you last visited the forums
2) displays only the messages and comments since you last visited

There are also a bunch of other forum improvements. Here are links to the messages I've written describing each:

new: "your forums" page totally redone
as requested: photo/username in forums links to bios
as requested: comments in a thread are sorted oldest first
new forum feature: move a message to another forum
new forum feature: email me replies to this message

John Buckman
2 years ago

Forums revamped

John Buckman — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:52:44 GMT

Forums revamped

The forums feature at BookMooch has been extensively revamped.

The biggest change is the main forum page itself. Messages and comments are now displayed together, and you can filter out things that are older than XX days old.

The forum overview page now looks like this:

Here is a breakdown of new features:

(1) the subject line is in bold on top. If you click on it, you'll get a page with the message and all comments displayed.

(2) a pulldown menu lets you choose to filter out older messages. Here are the choices:

(3) Recent comments are displayed below the message, with the most recent shown first. Carriage returns are not displayed this level, in order to make the comments more compact. If you click on the (1 hour ago) text, you'll jump to a page showing all comments, and you'll be on that comment directly.

(4) You can write a comment from this level. After saving your comment, you can go right back to this forum overview, or go to the message itself and read all the other comments.

(5) If you are filtering out some comments (as being too old), you can read the rest of them by clicking the 5 more comments link.

Other forum features that are new:

You can put <quote>quote</quote> tags around text you're quoting, and it will be displayed in an attractive way. Here is an example: Lyn's ideas for Angeling
Parts of your message that refer to other things at BookMooch, such as books, users, wishlists, wiki documents, etc are all marked up with pretty icons. An example: Roger Bridgman : How Nearly Everything Was Invented, bio and inventory.
You can also put brackets around text and the forum software will figure out how to link it (ie, such as linking to an author name, such as Ayn Rand). Read more about it on the wiki: Write_a_new_message

Since the forum software is shaping up, I'm going to start using it for this "official BookMooch blog"

John Buckman
2 years ago