Surviving College Life

Don’t Spend, Swap: Trade Books & DVDs for the Price of Postage

July 10th, 2008 Jamie

Now that it’s summer and you finally have time to read (I mean non-textbooks) and clear out your Netflix queue, it’s probably a lot more tempting to spend down your summer savings on paperbacks and DVDs.

I used to buy used books & movies off of Half.com, but with shipping even that can get pricey. In the past few months I’ve relied on our local Goodwill bookstore for cheap books (they’ve been in really good shape, too!), but I’m thinking of trying out the online book-swap (or DVD-swap) scene.

How it Works

There are quite a few sites that offer swap services, and they’re all (basically) free. Most of them work like this:

1. You sign up for their website (for no charge).
2. You list 10 books/movies/CDs/video games that you have and are willing to trade.
3. You list 10 books/movies/etc.that you want to get.
4. You mail a book/movie/etc. you have to someone who requests it. They give you feedback when they receive it.
5. You earn points (ways to earn vary, but usually sending a trade out to someone else means you earn a given number of points).
6. You trade in points for books/movies/etc. that you want. Someone mails it to you, and you give them feedback.

You should check out each individual site for specific details on how trades work-some function a little differently than this.

Where to Trade

I haven’t used one of these sites yet, but after some research (via Google and some of my other daily blog reads) I came up with several options:

• PaperBackSwap.com* (books)
• BookMooch.com (books)
• SwapADVD.com* (DVDs)
• SwapTree.com (books, DVDs, CDs, video games)
• TitleTrader.com (books, DVDs, CDs, video games)

* found via The Simple Dollar

So far I’m leaning toward SwapTree, because it has a good rep (as far as I could tell) and it lets you trade all kinds of things. If you’ve used any of these, please share your feedback!

photo: silence by benedeki

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Entry Filed under: discounts deals & freebies