Acquiring Used Books Creatively

It's easy to go online and buy new books from Amazon or similar vendors. And there are plenty of used books for sale online too - also through Amazon and other good used book sites. But there are lots of other ways to find and share used books. Each of these sites has a slightly different twist. And believe it or not, I found this list in a recent issue of Family Circle magazine!

BooksFree.com works like Netflix. You pay a monthly fee to borrow new books or similar products. For $11/mo you can have two paperback books at a time. They also have children's books and audiobooks (on CD or MP3). Pricing varies depending on how many items you have at a time and what formats you want.

A couple of swapping sites, AmericasBookShelf.com and BookMooch.com, allow you to share the books right on your own shelf with others, and thereby acquire points to get books that others have in their homes. Costs are low. AmericasBookShelf has a small annual fee and you pay $3.50 for each book you "borrow", but this covers shipping costs. BookMooch is free, but you have to pay for your own shipping.

BetterWorldBooks.com is more like a typical used bookstore, where you can buy or sell used books. What makes them different is that they used money raised from the online store and books that are acquired through book drives to support literacy programs around the world. According to their site, they have raised over $7 million for literacy.

BookCrossing.com has a more whimsical approach, sort of a WheresGeorge for books. If you have a book to share, you can register it at BookCrossing and then leave it somwhere - in a coffee shop, in a hotel, on a coffee shop, at the gym. The person who picks it up can enter the number in to find out where it came from and you can track where your books go as they travel the world.