After clearing out the cupboards over the holidays, I found myself with more than a few books to give away. Normally I’d just take them to BookOff, but a friend suggested bookmooch.com. It’s basically a free book exchange site. You list your books, and then people request them from you. Adding books is really easy as it all ties into Amazon’s database, so you get book covers too to check if you’ve got the right book and there’s no human error that usually breaks the search function.

I noticed while adding the books that some were already on people’s wishlists – so once you’ve added a book someone else wants they will automatically get an email telling them that one has become available. Then when a request is made, the system will tell you and you can go ahead and send it on. Each book you send gets you points, but a key point is that you have to pay the postage yourself. You can choose whether or not you’re willing to send internationally, and if you agree to do so you will get more points in return. Then you can use those points to get books that you want!

Sounds good in theory, and there’s a huge number of books listed specifically for Japan, but I still haven’t found anything to use my points on. Searching for a specific book is unlikely to yield results in Japan, and just browsing through all the books situated here gave me pages upon pages of Danielle Steele and other bad fiction. Sadly, the search function doesn’t let you narrow it down by GENRE and COUNTRY, and a quick search for “php” or “bread” books in Japan yielded zero results.

If I put the effort in to browse through all the books, i think I might find something – but then, I’d rather spend that time doing other things. You might want to give it a go though, if only for piece of mind that your books will actually be going to someone rather than sitting on the shelves of BookOff until they’re eventually recycled.

Why was I looking for “bread” books anyway though? Well, that’ll be because I recently got hold of a fantastic breadmaker for free from a lovely girl called Heidi in Osaka. Thanks Heidi! She posted a message to the FreeStuffJapan mailing list, and I snapped it up in no time. Since then I’ve been making a loaf or cake every day~