Read Any Good Books Lately?
Newsday (Newspaper) - 7/27/2005 by Andy Rathbun
If you have, you may want to join PaperBack Swap.com and trade your favorite titles with the site's users.
The 10-month-old book-swapping site works like an online library. After registering, users put at least nine of their own books into the site's database, which carries 39,000 titles. When a user requests a book, the site e-mails a printable page (that also serves as a makeshift book wrapper) to the user who posted that title.
Currently romance is the hottest genre - the Harlequin series is on fire - though other areas, like history and literature, are closing fast.
The titles are primarily paperbacks, though they do have the odd audio book or hardcover.
Currently, the site is free to join. The only cost to participate is the price of postage to mail a book, which is usually less than $1.50, paid by the sender.
"We have not made a single penny," says Robert Swarthout, 23, a computer repairman who co-founded PaperBackSwap with business partner Richard Pickering, 44, who works in real estate. "In the future, we may charge $20 a year, but people save $500 or $600 by trading and not having to buy the title."
To save that much on $10 paperbacks, of course, you would have to read more 50 books a year. But that's no problem for users like Sylvia Sturgis, a Staten Island resident who tears through five titles a week.
"Oh, my God, you don't believe how much I use" the site, says Sturgis, who works in business administration in Manhattan. "I bet I sent out 20 books in the past two weeks. I've got that many on order."
The 10-month-old book-swapping site works like an online library. After registering, users put at least nine of their own books into the site's database, which carries 39,000 titles. When a user requests a book, the site e-mails a printable page (that also serves as a makeshift book wrapper) to the user who posted that title.
Currently romance is the hottest genre - the Harlequin series is on fire - though other areas, like history and literature, are closing fast.
The titles are primarily paperbacks, though they do have the odd audio book or hardcover.
Currently, the site is free to join. The only cost to participate is the price of postage to mail a book, which is usually less than $1.50, paid by the sender.
"We have not made a single penny," says Robert Swarthout, 23, a computer repairman who co-founded PaperBackSwap with business partner Richard Pickering, 44, who works in real estate. "In the future, we may charge $20 a year, but people save $500 or $600 by trading and not having to buy the title."
To save that much on $10 paperbacks, of course, you would have to read more 50 books a year. But that's no problem for users like Sylvia Sturgis, a Staten Island resident who tears through five titles a week.
"Oh, my God, you don't believe how much I use" the site, says Sturgis, who works in business administration in Manhattan. "I bet I sent out 20 books in the past two weeks. I've got that many on order."
