Hi all! I know we have a lot of readers on the forum, and wondered if any of you had any suggestions for good sites to swap books.
I've tried out a couple in the past, and to be honest their names are usually so similar that I forget which ones are the ones I've tried and which ones I've only read about.
I'm looking specifically for a site that lets you trade books directly. I don't like the pay-it-forward point system that most of the sites seem to have. I tried it once. Traded away a couple of new popular YA books. Got a couple of points to request new books, great. Went to request books from my list....and all the good ones had waiting lists several thousand people long. I was able to get an older book off my list, but never did find anything I wanted to get with the points I'd gotten from my other book, so I essentially ended up just giving that book away. (I think that site may have been PaperbackSwap?)
There was another site I was a member of that I actually liked. It matched you with other people (sometimes two other people, to make 3-way trades possible) and you traded a book you had for a book on your want list. It was great. Only problem I had with that one was that there were a couple of books that I really wanted to get rid of that weren't on the site's list (too new, maybe?) so I couldn't list them to trade them away. Also, it seems like that site eventually shut down. I can't seem to find it anymore.
Every so often I go on a big book binge. I buy a bunch of new books, carefully selecting them based on reviews from Amazon and Goodreads. And usually, despite my careful research, the majority of them suck. But I'm left with a handful of books that are new and apparently popular, that I'd love to trade away rather than just donating (being brand new and all) or keeping them around collecting dust.
So, readers, does such a site exist? Is there still hope that I can trade away my extra copy of Insurgent and get something back for it that was written in the last decade? Or are The Raven Boys and Die For Me destined to sit on my shelf until the end of time, because I can't bring myself to send my shiny new hardcovers off to a garage sale?