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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? One way to understand what's going on the BM economy is to look at the BookMooch stats page at
http://bookmooch.com/about/stats You can see charts, as well as download CSV files that import easily into Excel. I also make the entire BM database available in anonymized form at:
http://bookmooch.com/api/feeds Some people have downloaded the data feed and come up with their own charts and analysis, such as Brett Tomlinson's recent ones:
http://sunrisecodeworks.com/BookMoochStatistics.html You're welcome to post your thoughts here, as well as do any -john
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John Buckman
13 years ago
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Comments
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John said:
"I've also thought about the occasional "nag" to people who mooched a very in-demand book over (say) 6 months ago, letting them know that lots of other people want to mooch the book, and it'd be great if they read it soon and regifted it. Just an idea..."To really kick along the onward movements of more popular books, could you possibly develop a TBR inventory? That perhaps only the BM member would see, that could show who/what & how many wishlists a book is on. The member may then choose to read a highly-wished-for book next.
1) In an effort to earn themselves more points,
& 2) In an effort to keep those highly-wished-for books moving out to others.
I know that, that is certainly how I would use a TBR list.
And TBR books could then easily be moved to inventory list with the click of a 'move to inventory' tab.
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Oh, & another thing...
When mooches are received they can then be entered directly into the TBR list, in the same way that received mooches are entered into one's LibraryThing account at the point of receipt, rather than necessitating the manual listing of each received book.
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I am like you Michael, points are nearly valueless to me now. I send out books around the world, the points pile up, I give them to charity, send more books, etc. A couple of ingredients now seem to be lacking for me - people willing to send books to me, and the inability to snap up available books within a millisecond of them being listed. I'm sorry to write this because I love the concept of Bookmooch.
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Your nagging idea might work, except on users like me who hurt the BM economy by mooching titles here, but then listing them on competitor's sites when I am done. We need to fix the causes for that first. For me, I do it because my BM points are essentially worthless, since I haven't been able to get a WL book in nearly a year now. I am not quite at this point yet, I am still posting books every few weeks, but not for the points. It's because I love Bookmooch and I have made quite a few mooching buddies internationally. And I angel mooch. However, "nagging" would not encourage me to post more often. A small point incentive for posting wishlisted books might, but probably not since I don't need the points. A TBR list (viewable only by me) which showed how many wishlists a book I was contemplating reading next is on might help. We have a catch-22. Fewer people are posting books because they don't need the points. They are not using their points because their wishlist books are not being posted. They don't post wishlist books because they don't need the points. It is an evil cycle;). I don't know what would fix it. BTW, I have a few mooching buddies who have told me they will be mooching less, if at all, because they have received eReaders.
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I think the most important thing that is needed to make Bookmooch yet more successful is more members. I, too, have mostly stopped adding inventory because I feel that I have enough invested in Bookmooch. When my points balance goes down a bit, I'll add more inventory instead of giving the books to charity shops. I also wonder about limiting the number of copies of a book which may be added to inventory? For example, most of those Da Vinci codes are never going anywhere!
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I'm one of those people who stopped listing because I have too many points and not anything to spend them on. (I'm not listing at any other book site either for the same reason...I have books on my PBS WL that have been there since 2006.) One of the reasons I've been discouraged with BM is that so many of my mooches go bad. I attempted mooches 16 times in 2010 and 3 times in 2011. Of those, 1 was lost in the mail, 2 were cancelled by the poster because the poster had listed it on another site and 2 I cancelled because of non-response. That's over 25% failed mooches.
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I confess to not reading all of the posts but only some of them. I know I am not posting many books on either site that I do. I only post enough books in either place to cover what I need. I just don't have the budget to keep a large stash of credits anywhere. I keep 5-10 pts on each site and that's it. I used to buy cheap WL books just to post but now I can't. I would love a TBR feature here that only I could see and showed if a book was WL. Although I find that here, just because a book is WL doesn't mean it will be ordered. I have many times posted WL books here only to have them just sit. I think I have 2 of them in my inventory now. I don't want to have to email these people and beg them to mooch my book. I'll post a few more when I get to spend a few more pts. I do have a couple of WL books available now but they're out of country and I don't really want them bad enough to pay 3 pts for them. Especially since I can't afford to mail international anymore. I do still occasionally mooch a non-WL book but only if my library doesn't have it and I need it for a series. I just have too big of a TBR pile here to mooch any old book just to use up points. A Nag Feature would not make me happy. I noticed that a DVD swapping site I do is sending emails now like this and I find them really annoying. I'll repost it when I'm good and ready. I really try to relist books on the same site that I get them from.
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