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

I am wondering if it is an issue of the audiobooks not being properly posted or the site organized to get them into the audiobook section. What was there today were mostly foreign language volumes and a paperback book, according to the site.

The audiobooks that I posted were all requested within 24 hours, so that is wonderful. However, I will have trouble using my points, I believe, because finding audiobooks at BookMooch is rare.

Do you have any suggestions? For me, more audiobooks, or easier to locate ones, would be the only area I would like to see improved. I would be a regular user if I could request audiobooks here.

Thanks for having this site available and for all your efforts.
Vicky

However, I would like to point out that if you mostly sent out audio books today, that means that *other* people seem to have no problem finding your audio books, so the system can't be too broken.

-john

I seem to cancel more items than I receive lately. I currently have 3 items pending which I requested over a month ago had acknowledged, and reminded the sender over 2 weeks ago without any response or anything shipping.

I'd like to be able to search using my LibraryThing recommended list so I could find more books.

Specifically i wish there were two topical trees - nonfiction with all the categories within that and fiction as a seperate tree could still have the same categories but pull completely different searches. E.g. when i look in sports i'd like to choose a sports non-fiction category or a sports fiction category but not find novel's about sports when i want biography or how too. etc...

I have dealt with a couple of these turkeys within the last couple of months.

I have listed several audio books and the same two people are the only ones requesting them. I think they must have been looking by author possibly as they were all, but one, by the same author.
I would also like to find some new audiobooks for myself.

I am interested in books about animals and I have not been able to figure out exactly what topic they would be in to browse. When I pick nature too much shows up and I do not want to spend the time looking through all that is listed to find something I would like to read.

I just recently started going through my "recommended" books and am finding too that they are showing books I myself have already given away. I have found some new titles and authors that way.

Thank you for always looking for ways to improve - we "moochers" appreciate all you do!

It seems to me if you made these books worth more say 2 or 3 points and the older or surplus books worth .5 a point perhaps it would cut down on the surplus of points and older books as well by creating more of a market for newer book owners to list there books.

For instance a few weeks ago I listed a new book that's also on the New York Times best seller list which was in perfect condition (no creasing on the spine as I am careful with my books and only 4 days old) , it was mooched in an hour or so after I listed it. Then to my frustration I realised that I used that point to mooch request a book that was a few years old and only selling price of 6 dollars. The trade off didn't really seem even and I am now holding off mooch requesting until I find books that are newer which takes a while or may never happen. If that book had been worth say 2 points and the older book only worth .5 (for example) it would have seemed like a much better trade off and I would have still had points left to pick up a few other older titles that I do indeed still want. On my wish list I have several older titles that consistantly have 40+ copies available but I just can't bring myself to mooch request them as most of the titles I give away are worth more money then those. I have several newer books that I don't know if I will list or not because the point value doesn't seem worth it for those more expensive copies right now.

Also I have several older titles in (great condition)that I simply don't see the point in listing as there are already 100+ copies available and will probably not get mooched anytime in the near future because there are so many of them on here. But if those titles were only worth .5 a point then I would feel more confident in listing them as I myself would be more likely to mooch request for a cheaper book just because it's a good deal or because I happen to only have .5 points.

(A system for how to base the amount of points a book is worth could be simply basing it off of the retail price of the book)

These are just some ideas agian I don't really know if this idea would work or how well it would work but it seems to me if everything in the world was only worth $1.00 select companies would all have a monopoly on there respective markets.

I thoroughly enjoy using Bookmooch and might make a couple of suggestions to keep the system healthy as you say.

One reason for slowed activity just simply could be that after a time when you are new and go crazy, you slowly start collecting a lot of the books you were looking for and so you reach a sort of saturation point where there is not so many books out there that you actually need or want - so this could account for some slowdown on the site.

One major way to counter this, and to increase the "economics" - would be to maybe do more promotion to bring in new members - new members equals new books, which equals more transactions and a healthier communtiy.

Why not add a new way of getting points - by having a way to refer people to bookmooch, and you then gain some points when that person signs up and lists books and becomes an active member.

This could create a snowball effect with people earning points for bringing new people and books into the system which should serve to both enrich the community and make sure that it does not stagnate.

Thanks John.

Happy Mooching.

Audiobooks are an interesting problem because they would indicate a State rather than a Topic or Genre. It almost seems that a simple tagging system would work better to enable searching. That way, a book could be searched by state, genre, or author.

Eric, my husband and I both have Kindles, but somehow that hasn't reduced the number of paper books coming into the house!

I've never really had a problem with mooching books until recently. It seems like I mooch a book and person accepts the mooch and says, "Oh, I'll send it in a couple weeks" or something to that effect. And that's it. They go inactive and don't respond to reminders. It's pretty disappointing, especially if it's a book I've been wanting for a while.

Please clean up the Browse so there is some hope of finding a book by topic. Also, if an author has a common name, searching by author is very frustrating. If you give an exact name like John Jones, do you miss J. Jones or J. J. Jones or Jones, John? How this works is unclear. So I search for just Jones and pore through pages of Jones listings in no particular order, so far as I can see.

I haven't had any luck with my Wishlist but I still live in hopes!!!

Thank you to all at BookMooch........I would be lost without you.
Happy New Year too!

P.S. JUST LISTED AN AUDIOBOOK 0001046934 The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie Audiobook Cassette by Muriel Spark if any of you are interested!!!

In regard to general health, my biggest issue has been those who list books, and then 1) go on vacation forever, 2) never reply to mooch requests 3) abandon accounts with books still listed. I love the bookmooch site, but find the above situations all very frustrating. I have a book on my list that I requested in June and it has still not been sent, though it was accepted. Reminders net no response. I don't know whether to abandon the request, or to cancel it, or just be patient.

Overall, however, I need to say... this is a wonderful site, and I want to thank you John for putting it together and maintaining it. You bring a lot of joy to a lot of people through this effort.

Plus I don't know that the ratio of mooching to giving if odd and not easy to understand (the ratio I have is like 7:1 and it was confusing at first since I have sent 60 books and only mooched 5, so I wasn't sure how it all worked).

I didn't even know audiobooks could be listed and mooched to be honest. If I knew before I would have listed a few and mooched a few before going out and buying them.

I agree with Doug "Something I would love to see is the ability to pull back and/or replace books that are not moving without losing the points associated. I have about 40 books listed, that since no one is mooching, I would really like to just send them off as a donation, but because I listed them, and tend to use my points (I have about 1030 wishlisted!), I don't feel I can pull them off, as that would put me in the negative, (I don't know if I can even go negative!). At the very least, I'd like the ability to "remove and replace" books that have aged in the inventory. To add to that, I think that this would keep the inventory "fresh". One thing I notice is that I am constantly passing up the same book that is either not moochable due to an inactive account, or in my case from a location outside of the U.S. since I have not been mooching books outside of country. Keeping the inventory fresh seems to me to be important in regard to maintaining "mooch interest"." I too have books that aren't moving so I would like to pull them and donate them to either the library or a school (some are college texts) without losing the points.

I do like that you can look at the feedback others have received before deciding if you want to mooch from them, and by their activity level (and who they mooch to). Since I found this site I have enjoyed getting requests from all over the world, and although I haven't accepted every one I really like that I can give and mooch books from everywhere.

Honestly I love this site. I am incredibly happy to have found this site because it has saved me money on books and has let me share books I have liked with others. So besides the above issues I like this site tons.

As for the links to amazon: for international moochers this is not always working. There are not many or no books at all in Indonesian, Dutch, Swedish etc. Therefore adding books by hand should get more priority I think!

I.e., books high on the "most wishlisted" list would earn more points for the moochee -- even some fractional percentage, like 1.2 points -- than titles with which BM is awash. (Dan Brown and James Patterson, I'm looking at you...)

Just a thought.

*Eric Adams thinks that the decline is partly due to the people who have become e-readers.... funny thing is that I have heard lots of e-readers say that they only use that for travelling by train and that they actually hate it that they don't actually own the book and are afraid to loose the books they already bought when new software is going to replace the old software. Others say they read it through e-reader first and then decide if they buy/want the book. I however think that it is partly due to the fact that people forget that they also can add books which are NOT on amazon. Amazon is very limited, and especially when it comes to cover pictures you only will find new issues there. I only became a moocher 2 weeks ago, and I first thought that I could not add such books. Now I have found a way to add books by hand (but without a way to upload pics authomatically for that same book) I am planning to add a lot of older books, which also should be nice for people who not only read but also collect.

*Would be nice if we could have some extra's on our bio, like something were we can seperately add authors, series, genre's we collect.
In general I think bookmooch is great, just needs some extra promotion.

Oh and a tip when it comes to sending outside your continent, being a bit expensive. Limit yourself to a number of books to send that far per month, or to a maximum amount of money. Or try to mooch from that same person so it feels like exchanging with someone.

Namely, how is this value determined ... according to WHOM, and WHERE? Amazon's new/retail price, or the lowest used/third-party seller's price on Amazon Marketplace? Also, is that Amazon's U.S. price, or the price on the Amazon site in (or nearest to) the moocher's country?

That's all too complicated. Why not weight the point value of a book based on its relative demand, as determined by Bookmooch's "Most Wishlisted" records? You could make a book's current value a function of the number of wishlists on which a title appears.

This way, a book like Frank Warren's PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives -- which is currently on 821 wishlists, but which no one is listing -- would reward someone who listed that book with a generous point premium, say 2 points instead of 1. (Or 6 instead of 3 for international shipment.) If demand for that book drops, to 400 wishlists for example, the point premium could fall accordingly ... maybe only 1.5 points. (You'd have to work out a scale that makes sense.)

Books which fall in some "average" range of wishlists -- between 0 and X (whatever X might be) -- would be valued at the normal rate.

(I considered the idea of detracting from a book's value if hundreds of copies were available, but that would probably serve no purpose. I'd say leave the umpteen copies of The Da Vinci Code and The Pelican Brief at their current value.)

I realize that this sounds complicated too. I also realize that this system does not reward the listing of very obscure and interesting books, which might only be wishlisted by a few people, but which are still hard to find.

However, this idea:

1) would give people more incentive to list books that other moochers WANT rather than shoveling dime-a-dozen paperbacks into their inventory.

2) does not punish people who list very common books (these would simply keep their current point value),

3) would be driven by data that Bookmooch already stores: namely "appears on X wishlists."

Just some thoughts which might or might not work ... I defer to John's vastly superior research and experience in running a microeconomy like Bookmooch's.