Did you mooch some books on 2009 already?

BookMooch is a very cool book-swapping community and a dear partner, so a new year is a good excuse (not that we need one) to remind you of our collaboration with them and how you can benefit from it!

BookMooch is based on a very simple and user-friendly points system, where every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch.

With more than 74,000 members from all over the world and 500,000 available book titles, there's always a good book you can mooch. Once you've read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish. And yes, it's totally free. You only pay for mailing your books.

BookMooch and Eco-Libris have partnered last year to offer Green Mooching, a special incentive to BookMoochers to balance out their books, and to Eco-Libris fans to start mooching some books.

For every 10 books you balance out you will receive a free BookMooch point you can then use to mooch a book online for free. If you don't have a BookMooch account yet go get one :)

The process is very simple – email us your BookMooch username after you make a purchase on Eco-Libris, or enter your BookMooch username in the comments box during the payment process. We will credit your BookMooch account accordingly.

As we wrote here before, we believe that book swapping is a great concept: you can find books you are looking for at no cost, give books you want others to enjoy and of course benefit the environment. It's very similar to the concept of a library - maximizing the usage of every printed book minimizes the need to print new ones and saves many trees from being cut down.

Don't get me wrong - we don't want people to stop buying new books, but as long as books are printed mostly from virgin paper, we would like to see maximum usage for each printed copy. Therefore, we support the concept of book swapping and communities such as BookMooch.

No only that - from some data gathered it appears that the free swapping actually stimulate new book sales, as well as bring more people to read more books, so all in all it's this model is also beneficial for the book industry as well. You actually don't need this data to get to this conclusion with the growing free content that is provided by authors and publishers online to promote their books' sales.

For more information please check BookMooch website - www.bookmooch.com

Enjoy your mooching,

Raz@ Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net