I am really getting tired of getting messages saying there will be a delay is sending a book I've mooched! What is the problem? If you can't afford to mail the books, close your account! Most recently I got a message saying there will be a delay on a book I mooched 17 days ago. How much MORE of a delay is reasonable to put up with? I always send my books out within 3 days. If it will be longer, I contact the moocher and let them decide if they are still interested. I'm very frustrated!

Michal - you have to remember that unless you have highly wishlisted books, most books will not get mooched as soon as they are listed. It does seem a bit strange to list a very popular book at a time when you won't be able to send it, but for most books it is impossible to predict when they will be mooched and what your situation will be then.

Personally, I often look around bookmooch for books I've never heard of but may be interested in. So I would rather that people list their books, even if they can't send them for a while. That way they are there to be found.

I get why people don't want to vacation their account because they have pts they want to spend. But don't keep adding books to your inventory that are WL. That's what gets me.

I have asked Bookmooch before and heard nothing back, but it would be really nice if you could put just your inventory on vacation. I think this would really cut down on the need for so many people to delay books. When I was making my last move and knew I wouldn't have access to my books for a month-I just donated them all. I used to have a lot more posted here. But I had 20 or 30 pts at that pt and wanted to be able to spend them. I was goign to be able to receive books. So I just deleted my inventory and donated them.

Imagine waiting for merchant ships to bring items from another country in days of old. Sounds so romantic, but, it sometimes took months and months to arrive. I am trying to regain some of the patience I had, even as a child, and this place should be a help to practicing it
and see delays as a good thing. But I am failing miserably! I offered someone money last week to just go ahead and ship me the books on delay.

She was nice enough to say they'd get them out fairly soon, and didn't accept my offer. But I was just so tired of waiting I wanted to pay postage for them to be shipped out and just be done with it.
I feel pretty ridiculous being so antsy though. I really wish it didn't matter to me, somehow.

There's a much easier way.

Go to "save for later" and choose "import into save for later" from the pull down menu. Give it the file that you exported from your inventory.

The file formats between export/import should be compatible.

-john

Problem is, there's no penalty to them. Maybe a display for each user, "average days per mooch" or something shown when you mooch from them, so people know how poorly some people treat the BM system and can opt to use a better moocher as a supplier.

Heather - "*Most* serious users (I'm excluding newbies and the "occasional" BM user) will put their shipping status in their status message." I am talking about those who do not. Which, in my experience, have been a considerably high number of people.

But I am very sure that the attitude you have, which it shocking, is the reason many people have left for greener pastures. As the inventory drops here, it increases at other sites that have standards in the time and condition categories.

You make your mailing process very clear in your status. No one who mooches from you should have a complaint. If they are unhappy with the arrival time of a book that they mooched from you, it is their own fault. Unfortunately, not everyone has taken the time to explain their mailing procedures and timeline as thoroughly as you have and/or they don't communicate a "delay" or communicate with an email. If every member were as thoughtful as you, this particular thread wouldn't even exist.

John

I think a lot of us have ridiculously large TBR piles. I think maybe it's likely that it is more newer users that are worried about shipping times. The site is new to them, and they are probably a little nervous about whether people here are honest, and the only thing that makes them feel more comfortable is if they get that book in their hands right away! I suspect their need to hurry will lessen over time.

That's not to say that people should be willing to wait forever, but I think it wouldn't hurt if we all practiced a little more patience. An extra week or month of waiting for a used book to arrive isn't particularly tragic. If the moocher does have a time constraint (for a class or maybe a trip), then he or she should communicate that to the book owner, who can decide if they are able to send the book within the desired time frame.

As a not-new member who disagrees with you, I take issue to the inclusion of the word "month" in your post. Patience is one thing. A few extra days? Fine? A week? sure. But when does it go past an acceptable wait as opposed to being someone who puts books on their inventory even though they have no intention of sending it out soon? That is why myself and others think there should be standards, even though there is no agreement on what that standard should be.

Personally, I agree with one of the posts above: Don't list books unless you are able, at this moment, to send it. That still doesn't keep you from mooching books with your existing points, using the forums, and whatever other activities you wish to do here.

As you say, there is no agreement on what the standard should be, but I don't think that imposing a strict two week deadline for mailing (with some sort of penalty if you don't) really fits into the spirit of BookMooch. Even if a mailing deadline were imposed, I think it would have to be a little more accommodating. Personally, I don't think people should take more than a month to send a book, but I don't want to see a deadline or a penalty based on my own standard.

Recently, I had some mooches to mail. Before I could get to the post office I had an injury and ended up on crutches (8-12 weeks - ugh). I didn't get to the post office as quickly as I normally do. With a two-week deadline for mailing, I would have had incurred the unnamed penalty and had to plead my case to the abuse team for an exception (and everyone has an excuse, some of them true, some of them not). But this is why I don't agree with an automatic penalty - you are guilty until proven innocent. I managed to get to the post office, and believe me it's no fun to stand in line for a 15-20 minutes on crutches with a back pack AND a bag of packages to ship, but it would be ridiculous to expect other people to do that. And it probably wasn't a good idea that I did.

If I pay for a product, I generally expect the vendor to ship it within 2-3 days tops. But in Bookmooch, I am paying an average of $3 or so for a used book to be sent from a human being, not a large company taking my money.

Several people have talked about local post offices closing and having to travel farther to ship books. What is wrong with saving up several mooches to make one trip to the post office? With work and life going on, they might not be able to get there in 2-3 days. Post offices are also cutting back their hours. In the U.S. at least, you have to drop off packages at the post office if they weigh more than 12 ounces (unless they are metered). Same with media mail (they won't even allow you to print postage for media mail online). I might have snuck a couple of my lighter media mail packages into the outgoing mail at work, but most of my packages are more than 12 ounces. I've actually forgotten a couple times and put heavier packages in the outgoing mail and they were returned to me a week or so later (with the stamps all crossed out with black marker so I had to pay the postage twice).

Personally, I think it would be awesome if people could/would send their books quickly, but in the vast scheme of things, it just isn't that important to me. Not enough to dictate some arbitrary standard on everyone. I would also rather see people only list books when they intend to ship quickly, but I don't think a deadline and a penalty follow from that, because there are too many other reasons that keep people from shipping that have nothing to do with laziness or not having the funds.

I have both communicated a month or more delay (not for economic reasons, but for health reasons), and allowed someone to delay sending to me for over two months due to tight finances on their end.

Neither bothered me or them, because there was always PERFECT communication on both ends.

Why would that be a problem?

And unlike your experiences, I have had, of the 62 successful mooches and probably 30 unsuccessful mooches here, at least a third of them where people either waited up to 2 weeks to accept the mooch, never answered the mooch for 2 weeks EVEN THOUGH the system said they had just logged in recently, not inactive, people who indicate in their emails that they would send the book "in a few days" and then proceed to get around to it in a month, after a couple of email reminders.

(By the way - you can print media mail postage online, no extra fees. Use Paypal. https://www.paypal.com/shipnow )

But I guess what I meant to word better in the previous post is this -- if you don't have the money now to mail the book (a common excuse, rather than people claiming the PO is too far away) and you say that you'll ship when you have free money leftover... well, there's no guarantee you'll ship. In the meantime, you've probably spent my point on a book for yourself. It's a very common type of fraud that can be done on BM because the point isn't held in escrow, like at the main competitor's site.

All of the people in this thread who think there should never be any time limits or guidelines forget an important fact. Me, as the person mooching a book, has already spent money to get the point I'm giving you. So yes, in effect, you are like an online merchant. I've already spent the cost of the original book, plus $2.38 or more in postage. Out of pocket and gone. So having already spent the money, YES, I should expect decent service, as you say you would from a traditional merchant like Amazon or the like.

I make no claim to knowledge of how accessible the mailing systems are in other countries, I can only speak of the US.

I don't think it's fair to count the original cost of the book in the equation. You are basically trading a book for a book. The only cost outlay directly related to trading on Bookmooch is the postage cast (and perhaps packing materials if you aren't recycling). I don't think people are buying books solely to trade on Bookmooch (maybe occasionally they are buying really cheap used books, but that is not the norm). I absolutely do not equate BookMoochers to online merchants, and I do not expect Amazon-like customer service (maybe I would if I had a warehouse full of people to package and ship my books). I wouldn't even equate it to individuals selling items on eBay.

I also think you have had extraordinarily bad luck, and I don't think the long delays you experienced are the norm. I've had a few of those, but I've mooched over 1400 books, it's gonna happen.

Anyway, I should probably stop now with this thread, because people simply aren't going to agree. I miss the old BookMooch forum. Way more fun and people were nicer to each other. But I still wouldn't trade BookMooch for any of those competing sites. I like the way things are done here - that's why I am here and not elsewhere.

RE: "Delays"#comment_51

No disagreement there.

We're just saying with communication, a perfect balance can be achieved.

I normally don't delay shipments either, but when I got sick one time, I had to, and people understood. When you're in the hospital, not much can be done about books needing to be mailed out.

While I am a book dealer, BookMooch is not a business for me either. The vast majority of books I mooch are for my own collection and for that of my wife. I also mooch for my wife's friends, three of my granddaughters, and for other family members. The only books I mooch for business purposes are about a dozen titles for the local high school students. I am a collector and as such expect a reasonable response so that if I am not going to get a book I mooched for my collection, I can look elsewhere. The same for my wife. We also mooch books for her and her friends use with the several library book review clubs they participate in regularly. Although they have many other books to read, they need those books on a timely basis to read before they come up for review. And since I read several novels a week, my stockpile of things to read is quickly exhausted. I don't consider it unreasonable to expect that a member who "continues" to offer an inventory and communicates no statement of "delay" or provides no notice in their status should not communicate an acceptance within one month and mail the book within another month. John

Mike

I would hope that no one would disagree with this statement. I don't anyone has said you can take as long as you need to ship and you don't have to tell the moocher when that will be. If the book owner communicates with the moocher, then it is up to the moocher to decide is acceptable to them.

"My concern is what prevents someone from listing 100 books that are all requested immediately, spending the 100 points, and never shipping any books?"

There are in fact people do this, and most of them are scammers. ("Good" moochers generally won't spend all their points if they have a bunch of pending mooches.) Who prevents this from being worse than it could be? We do! While Admin often catches these accounts on their own, a lot of the time accounts are closed or put on hold because the iffy behavior is reported to the abuse team by other moochers who noticed that something about the account seemed amiss. I like to suggest that people take a look at the whole account of the person they are mooching from. Learning to evaluate user accounts is really important for a positive BookMooch experience.