Paperbackwap.com

Paperbackswap.com is today's happy topic.  Despite the name, you don't have to just swap paperbacks.  And you get two free credits after you post your first ten books. You can swap hardcovers and audiobooks on CD or cassette there.  They have sister sites for music CDs and for DVDs.

I joined PBS in March of 2008 and I've done some serious swapping there!  As of today, I have mailed 627 books and received 1192. I have no books posted because I can't afford the postage right now to ship them.

When you request a regular book from someone it costs you 1 PBS credit and the sender pays the postage.  You get PBS credits by sending your own books out, 1 for paper books and 2 for audiobooks, and you can buy up to 30 credits a month from the site, and right now they cost 3.95 each for the first two credits you buy, and 3.79 each for others in the same purchase.

There are discussion boards on the site, and one of them is called the Book Bazaar.  You can go there and always find people selling credits for less.  I've done that from time to time and I've never once got hosed.

My books were mostly destroyed in a storage space in 2007 so I was replacing them slowly when I found out about PBS.  They are all replaced now, and I'm still requesting books!

I mentioned that they have sister sites.  swapadvd.com is their movie site.  And credits are worth more there, so if you swap on the dvd side, and transfer your dvd credits to paperbackswap, your pair of dvd swap credits get you two credits on paperback swap.  You can only swap DVDs here, but they have a forum and I managed to unload a great many VHS tapes there.  I just posted a list in alphabetical order, and I think I asked 1 dvd swap credit for 5 VHS tapes.  They went like wildfire, to my surprise, and I had more credits to send to paperback swap.

I used some of my dvd swap credits on the dvd site, and that's why I can post in my Joy of Living post about how many DVDs I have!  And in that same post, paperback swap is mostly responsible for my huge quantity of books and audiobooks.

I haven't said much about the cd swap site because I'm tone deaf so music doesn't mean much to me, except for the lyrics.  I belonged there long enough to unload a lot of music CDs I didn't want.  And then I transferred my credits there to paperback swap so I could continue restoring my library.  I don't remember how many credits you get on paperback swap if you transfer CD swap credits, and I do seem to recall that there's a tiny fee per CD requested, like maybe a quarter.

If you have books, audiobooks, movies or music to unload, these three sites will almost certainly work for you.