Book swap sites March 2009

Book swap sites first look

If you're giving your book collection a spring clean, why not try out a free book exchange website? We tried ReadItSwapIt and BookMooch to see whether we could shift some books and get something we wanted in return.

Exchange books for the price of a few stamps using ReadItSwapIt

ReadItSwapIt

ReadItSwapIt is a UK-based service that claims to have more than 234,000 books available for swapping. It's free to join and to use.

If you find a book on the site that you'd like, you send a request to the owner of that book inviting them to view a list of your unwanted books. If they agree to swap, you get an automatic email containing their address so you can post the book to them. Sending a standard 300-page paperback book should cost about 90p if you send it second class.

Within three days of registering we'd swapped the 2007 edition of The Good Food Guide - even old versions are in demand - for a Lonely Planet travel guide to Peru.

As with buying items on eBay, we were able to leave feedback on the swap - the site says this helps prevent abuse of the system. The service was easy to use, although obviously it relies on other users having similar tastes in books to your own.

You can swap books for free using book swap site BookMooch

BookMooch

Although it’s also free to use and has a feedback system to stop abuse, BookMooch works a bit differently to ReadItSwapIt. For a start, it’s an international service – so although it has many more books (around 535,000) although not all of them are in English.

The other key difference is that books are not swapped but traded using a simple points system. One point is awarded for every book you give away and one point deducted for every book you ‘mooch’ (get from another user). Two points are deducted if the book is in another country, but extra points are awarded for posting books to users abroad to account for higher postage costs.

Just 75 minutes after registering on BookMooch we received a request for one of our books from a user in Ireland. We sent the book to him and used two of the three points we received to ‘mooch’ a book from an American user, which arrived a few days later.

Which? verdict on book swap websites

These book swap sites aren't as cheap as using your local library, but both are simple to use and offer a great – and strangely addictive – way to recycle old books. For more ideas on what to do with old books, read our online recycling guide.

Pros: Get new books for the price of a few stamps

Cons: Not all books are available, users in other countries may not post to you