Things I Like: bookmooch.com

I'm hesitant to recommend things to other people. I don't want to come across as a snob or a know-it-all. But there are some things that I get so excited about that I just have to share! And one of those things is BOOKS!
In order to read all these books in The Well-Educated Mind, I need to get my hands on a copy of each of them ... and there are a lot ... 31 on the novel list alone (and there are 4 other lists after that!).
While I am a huge fan of libraries, there are several challenges to borrowing these books from libraries, including availability and real-life messes. The messes part is my biggest worry. I'm not the nicest person to my books. I take them in the bathtub, I take them with me in my purse or diaper bag, I leave them at child-level. And I can't do any of that with a borrowed book.
Also, after looking over the list with Chris, we decided that most of these books we would like to have, permanently, in our home library.... what can I say? We both have degrees in English!
So, I started brainstorming ways to get copies of these books without buying them new.
When I was in Minot someone mentioned http://www.bookmooch.com/ as a place to swap books. In January, I went through our bookshelves and pulled all the books that we had that we would not read again, including some doubles, and listed them on bookmooch. By listing them on the site I am agreeing to ship these books at my own expense to anyone in the USA. You get points for listing and shipping books. You then use these points to "buy" copies of books that you want from other site users.
Below is a picture of all the books (minus 4) that I have mooched since January.

There have been some hiccups in the program. One book I mooched never came. I marked it as lost in the mail and received my point back. I've also dealt with several users that either took forever to ship books or who seemed to have stopped using/responding to the site, but I don't need to get any specific book quickly, so it hasn't been a problem for me.

To me, this site has saved me a good chunk of change. The books that I have listed are books that we would have given away, so to pay approximately $3 to ship each of them (I wrap them in paper bags from the grocery store and mailing tape) has been my total expense and I've gotten over 25 books in return. Gotta love that!