I recently ran accross a very cool blog post that talked about some very neat ways to get free books, trade books and give away your books.  I found the info here to be very interesting and useful, hope you will too.

If you’re looking to declutter your home and simplify your life, if you’re like me, one of the hardest areas to deal with is books: getting rid of old ones and cutting back on the expense of buying new ones.

But there are plenty of ways to get free or cheap books, and for the true fan of simplicity, these are the only ways to go.

First, let’s address the issue of getting rid of books: you gotta let go. I know, it’s difficult. It’s like getting rid of your children. But as the father of six children, I can tell you, sometimes it’s better with fewer of them in the house. (I’m kidding! About the children. Not the books.)

The question to ask yourself is this: “Why do I want to keep this book?” If you’re really going to read it again, keep it. I have a couple dozen books I truly love and really do plan on reading again, once I’ve forgotten the details.

But often books are kept almost like trophies or mounted animal heads — they show how much we’ve read, and the big books we’ve tackled, and how smart we are. Be honest with yourself — you’re never going to read most of those books again. You have too many ahead of you to tackle.

Get rid of them.

What follows are some of the best ways to get rid of your books, and to get more great ones for very little.

Bookswapping
This is one of the best ways to regularly get free books. Of course, you can do it for free with friends, family members, classmates, neighbors — I regularly swap books with people I know. But when you really want to get books you really want, online bookswapping services rock. They’re not free, as you usually have to pay for shipping, but they’re close.

• Bookmooch. One of the more popular of the online bookswapping services. Give away books to get credits, and use those credits to get other books you find online. Pretty good selection. It’s a free service, although you pay the price of shipping the books you give away.
• PaperBackSwap. Pretty much the same deal as Bookmooch — give away books to get credit, use credits to get other books. You pay for shipping (typically $2.13, according to the site). More than 1.3 million books available. No membership fee at this time.
• Readers United. Again, get credits for giving away books, use them to get other books. Free service, but you pay for shipping to give others your books.
• FrugalReader. Another book trading service. Free standard membership; the paid premium membership includes extra features.
• Title Trader. This takes the same concepts as the other book swapping services above and extends them to not only books, but CDs and DVDs.
• Bookins. Same kind of book swapping service, but with a $3.99 fee per book you receive. You don’t pay for shipping books out, however.
• WhatsOnMyBookshelf. Book swapping service … receive points for listing books and sending them, use them to get books from others. You pay for shipping books to others.
• Novel Action. This one works a bit differently than the others. First, there’s a membership fee of $25 a year (a little over $2 a month). No transaction fees, but you pay $4.80 for shipping up to 6 pounds of books. List books you want, and then send them an equal number of books. Once they’re received, you will get the books you want.
• ReadItSwapIt. This is for readers in the UK — again, give away and get books, just pay for shipping them to others. It doesn’t use a credit system like the others, and you are free not to send a book that’s requested by others. Free service.

Bookhopping
Similar to book swapping, bookhopping is a way to exchange books over the Internet. Basically, you list the books on your shelf, and agree to ship any of your books when they’re requested. In exchange, you can request any books you like. No points are earned or exchanged.

• BookCrossing. An extremely unique system, it’s more like karma for books. A very basic explanation: read a book, label it with a unique book number, and then leave it somewhere. Anywhere. You can leave it in a coffeeshop, with a friend, on a park bench (”releasing it into the wild”). There are designated book crossing spots all over the world, but they’re not required. If someone picks up your book, by chance, they write a little review of it online, and you can read all the reviews of the particular book you “released into the wild”. Now, you can also look at book crossing spots in your area to see what books have been left there, and go pick it up if you want. Interestingly, there’s a map that shows where books are “released” or “caught” all over the world — in real time. Fascinating. It’s definitely a must-see.
• America’s BookShelf. List your books online, and when one is requested, you’ll receive a postage-paid envelope in the mail — just drop it in the mailbox. To get books, you’ll need to buy book credits. Also charges a $12 annual membership fee ($1 a month).
• BookHopper. Works very similar to book swapping sites, but it’s slightly different. First, you list books that you’re willing to ship to people, and when they’re requested, you ship them (at your cost). You can also request anyone’s books. The more books you list, the more you can request. There’s no credits, but there’s a sort of karma system that incorporates how many books you list, how many you send, and the feedback you leave for others.

Really free books

• Library. The classic method, and it’s totally free. If you haven’t been to your local library recently, I’d recommend you give it a try. Many of them are surprisingly great.
• Friends, family, neighbors, classmates. Set up a little exchange with people you know. It can be a formal book club, or just set up a place to leave books, and when you’re done reading a book, leave it and take another. Get creative — no shipping costs are involved, so you can exchange great books for free.
• Free ebooks. If you don’t mind reading books on the computer, you can get thousands for free. There are a lot of sites for free ebooks, but a couple of the more popular include Project Gutenberg and Free-ebooks.net.

Other options

• BooksFree. It’s like NetFlix, but for books. Fairly low monthly membership fee, and you can check out multiple books at the same time. When you’re done, send them back (you don’t pay for shipping) and get the next ones on your list. No late fees. Lowest price is $9.99 for 2 books at a time; plans go up to 12 at a time.
• Zunafish. This is a trading site for anything, really. Not only books, but CDs, DVDs, games, computer stuff, anything. Just list the stuff you want to trade, and people will make trade offers. If you see an offer you like, agree to it, and then you each ship the stuff to each other. No membership fee, but there’s a $1 per transaction fee.
• Thrift shops. I make a regular trip to a couple of charity thrift shops (help a good cause and get books for only cents), as well as a very cheap used book store — I give them my used books for credits, and then pay only a couple of dollars for a couple dozen used books.
• Swapbooks. Despite its title, it’s really a way for students to sell used textbooks and buy them for cheap.
• half.com. A branch of eBay, half.com is a way to sell your used books and to get some good deals on other used books.
• LibraryThing. Well, this isn’t really a way to get free or cheap books (hence it’s not counted in the “20 Ways”) but I would be remiss if I talked about all these book services and didn’t include LibraryThing. What it is: simply a way to list your books online, and allow others to see what books you’re reading, and to see what others are reading. A cool tool.

This post was copied from: http://zenhabits.net/2007/07/20-ways-to-get-free-or-cheap-books-and-give-away-your-old-ones/

(From the editor)

Choice, we live in a world in which we all have many choices, starting from the 100′s of varieties of bottled water we can choose from, (all of which are basically the same) to the choice of which electronics store where we choose to purchase the latest gadget at (and of course the choice of the gadget itself).  We often make dozens of choices a day, and typically, given competition, and the marketplace, these choices do not end up costing us more money (most bottled water, regardless of the brand costs the same, as for gadgets, they tend to fall in a price range, where we pay more to get more).  The point I am trying to make is that our daily choices do not end up costing us money; additionally, if we had to choose from 2 items, both identical, but with a price difference of $50, most of us would obviously choose the cheaper item (this is commonsense!).  When dealing with textbooks this is the exact scenario that you are faced with: you can choose to go to the bookstore and pay the full price for the book, or you can choose to go to your favorite online bookstore and pay a slightly lower price, but if you want to get the true lowest price on the book your best bet is to use a service that is designed to compare prices, and is guaranteed to save you money, a service like, We Compare Books

I recently asked our intern to do a study, I told him to pick a semester of courses he had, and to pretend that he was going to buy books for said courses now, and to compare the difference in price  between the university bookstore, and We Compare Books, below is what he found.

Here’s a little experiment I did. I went on to my alma mater’s website and did a course search of a typical 15-credit semester course load in my major, International Relations. After compiling the listed prices for the books from the school bookstore, I then did a search for the books on WeCompareBooks to find the lowest price. I even included the estimated shipping costs. You can do the search yourself to verify.

Essentials of International Relations by Karen A. Mingst

ISBN: 0393928977

-         Bookstore price: $61.50

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $33.99

Understanding International Conflicts by Joseph Nye

ISBN: 0321472012

-         Bookstore price: $61.75

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $47.23

¡Dímelo Tú! by Francisco Rodriguez

ISBN: 1413031609

-         Bookstore price: $211.00

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $39.00

Western Civilizations by Judith G. Coffin

ISBN: 9780393926996

-         Bookstore price: $90.25

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $4.24

A Pocket Guide to Writing in History by Mary Lynn Rampolla

ISBN: 9780312247669

-         Bookstore price: $20.50

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $4.24

World Religions: A Historical Approach by Solomon A. Nigosian

ISBN: 9780312442378

-         Bookstore price: $48.00

-         WCB lowest price (plus shipping): $24.00

Total bookstore price: $493.00

Total WCB price: $152.70

In this instance, you would save $340.30 or 69%! This proves that if you really want to save money on your next textbook purchase, use We Compare Books. Please take note, though, that prices change on a daily basis and that the prices you get may vary slightly.

If you are in college already you know the cost of textbooks can be quite outrageous. Each year they seem to get more and more expensive, and the textbook companies continue to introduce superfluous new editions that really don’t change that much.

There is one group (I mean there is one group besides We Compare Books) – or rather a collection of groups – that is trying to “fight against the machine”, http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.com. This site is dedicated to addressing the problem of escalating textbook costs and advocating solutions. They are a collection of student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups) from across the nation that want to address the concern of ever rising textbook costs. Their preamble reads:
“The cost of college textbooks has become a major affordability issue for low and middle income students, adding to the potential that these students will either drop out, take on additional loan debt to pay for textbooks, or undercut their own learning by forgoing the purchase of textbooks.
Textbook publishers have not responded adequately to these concerns, but have continued to exacerbate this problem by raising prices and employing practices such as unnecessarily issuing new editions of textbooks.
Faculty and students both share a concern about textbook affordability and its impact on student success.
We must address this problem without undermining the academic freedom of faculty to choose course content.”
Their website is full of useful information about why the textbook industry is broken, how it takes advantage of students, and what students can do to educate themselves and try to fight back. They also have a sign-up page where you can add your signature to the cause to increase their numbers and influence. I definitely recommend every student check it out.