Box O'Books, and Swapping Anything You Want on TitleTrader

I was browsing around reading articles on how to get rid of more crap, and in the 100 Reasons To Get Rid of It article, I found a few more tips for recycling and swap services. The article was short on PSSs, but I was particularly interested in 2 services mentioned.

One is TitleTrader, which was suggested as allowing you to swap books, CDs, and videogames. I browsed through it and discovered that it currently has in beta a swap-anything-listed-on-amazon service. This is pretty cool, since it allows the operators to avoid maintaining a database of all the junk that currently exists in the world (and why should they, when amazon has such a good one?). It also helps the users, since they don't need to take photos of their stuff in order to list it.

Among their listings at this moment:

Accessory - 90 Apparel - 35 Audio Cassette - 767 Books - 65943 Calendar - 8 Cards - 28 CDs - 5696 Comic - 14 Digital - 5 DVD - 2384 Electronics - 30 Health and Beauty - 86 Jewelry - 50


And much much more!

I also browsed over to PaperBackSwap.com, which is a lot like bookmooch, though I don't know yet if it really is paperbacks-only. They do seem to be investing in great ideas though, like "Box-O-Books", a paid feature ($8/yr) available to members. I don't know if I can explain the feature better than they do, so I will just quote:

If you become a participating member of Box-O-Books™, you'll be able to access a list of other participants and browse their bookshelves. Once you find a participant that you'd like to swap a box with, you begin the process by selecting as many books as you are willing to trade with that member. Let's say s/he has 55 books posted, and you select 10 of them.

The system then sends an email invitation to the other member asking that member if s/he would like to trade up to 50 books with you. Next, s/he goes to your bookshelf and views all of your books. Then you both agree on the number of books that you want to trade (10 for 10, or any other combination).

For example, let's suppose that the other member only wants to trade for 7 of your books (and not 10). So you both agree on which books to exchange based on the priority of the books you listed. You each box up your books and take them to the Post Office. You mail your 7 books to him (or her), and s/he mails his/her 7 books to you! How cool is that? No credits needed, and you save on postage as well!

Sounds good to me. I'd love to trade 10 cookbooks for 10 other cookbooks. That would be a lot of fun!