Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Trading books

So I just discovered zunafish.com, and I'm totally hooked. It's a site where you can post DVDs, cds, and (most importantly for me) paperbacks that you don’t want and swap them with someone else. I read a lot (this is probably my personal mantra), I would guess, around 30-40 books a year. And while I enjoy most of them, I don’t enjoy them enough that I know I’ll read them again. This is a fantastic way to exchange my old books, for books I want. So far I’ve traded:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway for Stardust by Neil Gaiman

Do Penguins Have Knees for Sex and Religion: A Textbook

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller for We Are the Stories We Tell: Short Stories by North American Women since 1945 ed. by Wendy Martin

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce for First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

Unfortunately you have to pay a $1 to the site for the swap, but I figure, at least these books are not collecting anymore dust on my shelf and not going into a landfill, and furthermore, I'm making sure that the books that I'm getting are not going into a landfill.

My annoyances about this site are:

-limited selection (probably because it's relatively new)
-no categories for Fantasy or Romance (hello, it's like the largest market there is in all of American publishing!)
-limited science fiction section

Still, I'm looking forward to getting rid of the two bags of books collecting dust in my closet.

3 Comments:

At 5:34 PM, Blogger Jenny said...

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At 5:38 PM, Blogger Jenny said...

Hi Amy... try http://www.paperbackswap.com

I use it for all my book-reading (just received - Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers, Everything is Illuminated, Wind-up Bird Chronicles). Good stuff, all free, and you can post a wish list of the books you want, and once they become available, they automatically get sent to you.

I think http://www.frugalreader.com has a large romance novel following too, but the user base/functionalities aren't as robust as paperbackswap.

 
At 10:22 PM, Blogger alau said...

Thanks so much for the recommendation! I think I've found a new obsession with paperbackswap.com

 

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