Fewer Books, More Books
I’m a happy Mystie. :) In less than a week of joining paperbackswap.com I have sent off 8 books (meaning I have 8 credits, plus two free ones that come with listing your first ten books). Today in the mail I received St. Patrick and the Peddler, which is a Margaret Hodges (of St. George and the Dragon fame) story that is out of print. Our library has it and we’d checked it out before, so I knew it was good. The gist of the book is that an Irish peddler, who was poor and lonely (he doesn’t even have a dog) to begin with, is on the brink of starvation after the potato blight until — using a round-about method — St. Patrick in a dream reveals to him the location of a pot of gold. The happy ending begins with this line: “From that day on, the peddler was a rich man. He got a dog, and a horse, and a beautiful wife. What man could ask for more?”
You can set up a wish list on paperbackswap.com and be put in line to receive books that are not currently available. I have about 70 titles in my wish list (all the colors of Lang’s fairy tales, some Wodehouse, and a few hard-to-find titles Cindy of Dominion Family has talked about, as well as some I seriously doubt will ever be posted like How to Cook Everything and The Art of Simple Food). Then today I got an email whose subject was “Wish Granted.” I had a copy of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death waiting to be claimed. I put the old edition and the new edition on my Wish List and was very happy to get the old copy because I think the cover looks so much better. :) I was only #3 in line waiting for the old edition but #25 on the new — so it does pay to add all the copies of a title to your wish list if you really want it. There are at least 20 people who wanted this book before me, but only put the one version on their wish list. Now I just need to go remove the other copies from my wish list.
They also have a site for DVD swapping. It costs $1.81 to mail a DVD first-class, so swapping can be cheaper than renting, and you have the option of simply keeping the movie afterwards. Plus, you can swap your credits between the two sites and so could get a movie for a book or a book for a movie. Pretty nifty. DVDs list at a credit per disc.
And, yes, I keep including the logo because I get a credit if you sign up with me as your referrer. More books! :)
