Paperback Swap is a great way to exchange books for free. There are currently more than 200,000 books available to swap. Choose a book you want, and the member owning the book will mail it out to you for no charge. You then own the book. In turn, you list your unwanted books. For each book that you mail out to another member (at your expense), you receive a credit that can then be used to get another book. There is no fee for standard exchanges.
While this is a great service to use as is, there are strategies that you can use to ensure that you are getting the absolute most value in your Paper Back Swap exchanges. The more of these strategies that you apply, the more you will get from the service and the less you will spend on books, postage and mailing materials. You can even get as many as five or six books for one credit, while most others are only getting one book per credit!
I’ll be featuring a long series on all of the great ways that you can use Paper Back Swap to full advantage.
Here are the tips.
Getting Credits
First let’s talk about getting credits. To get a credit, you have to mail out one of your own books to another member. You also can get credits the first time that you join, free, to get you started. For even more credits, refer friends to Paper Back Swap. If they sign up, you get even more credits for the referrals. So refer as many people as you can to the service for the most “free” credits.
Check back again. We’ll finish talking about getting credits. Then, the next stop in this intensive series talks about where to find books to post in the most frugal way possible. Future installments also include strategies for making your trading books more valuable, how to get lots of books for one credit, and how to save the most you can when mailing out books to other members.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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