I did a lot of reading over the summer and burned through a lot of money on new books. At one point, I read three novels in about a week and a half and then had to force myself to slow down the pace with a couple non-fiction books. Not that reading a a novel every three days is a particularly fantastical feat. I remember reading Shane in one sitting for a school assignment when I was in about the fifth grade.

I have a friend whose wife is a competetive speed reader. These aren’t body-sanctioned contests, mind you, but a competitve habit of finding out what book a person is reading, getting it, and having it finished for the next time she sees them. I don’t think she’d be impressed by three books in ten days, either. But, for me it was pretty above average. I usually don’t make time to read and never read before sleep.

I also hold on to books. When I finish a hard-cover, I remove the dust jacket and toss it before retiring the book to a shelf. Sometimes I debate whether I shouldn’t have held on to the dust covers because they protect the book and help it retain its value. Or so I’ve heard. I just liked the way a natural hard-cover looked, so I started doing it one day and habits can be hard to break. Whenever I think of breaking this one, I remember all the covers of great books I tossed and talk myself out of dishonoring that sacrifice by saving the cover of something I read in half a week during lunch and bathroom breaks.

For me, books add up pretty quickly and take up a lot of space in an already cluttered living room. If I had a library, made of mahogany and with a fireplace, leather chairs and a wet bar with scotch in a crystal decanter no less, I’d happily tuck my past reads into it for future McMahon generations. But, I don’t. Instead, my books are stacked, stuffed, and piled onto a book case in our livingroom. Fortunately, there’s a solution that satisfies my problem of having too many books and also quenches my thirst for the written word.

Bookmooch.com is a book sharing community where members accrue credits from sharing books with other members. The credits are then used to get other books. Each book you give earns you a credit and every book you receive costs you a credit. It’s basically a book-for-book system, although you can earn additional credits for shipping to a foreign country and adding books to your list. When I ran a BBS, we used the same concept for sharing software: a game was a game, it didn’t matter if it was a 3-level version of Tank, it was still worth the same as the latest release. Sometimes to promote uploads, I’d give some people 2-for-1 credits on the latest releases. Bookmooch.com handles their credits well and keeps a user from stacking the deck by capping the send-to-receive ratio at 1:5 which is fair and still encourages good use.

The list of available titles is exhaustive and there are lots of quality books that would still retail very high. I’m going to go through my bookshelf tonight and post all the books I wouldn’t mind going. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading them, but there aren’t a lot of books that I read multiple times and only certain collections that I want to preserve and hand down. I’ll have to check with Maggie and see which James Patterson books can go and which she hasn’t read yet. Some of them Patterson just gave up naming and just started numbering. I think Maggie made it up to 4. She also has a bunch of Sue Grafton’s; Grafton lettered hers. If you see me on Bookmooch.com, pick out a book. Just don’t expect a dust jacket.

http://bookmooch.com/