So... it looks like Amazon.co.uk has still not approved our accesskey. And Amazon.com perma-banned us a while ago, with no way to even discuss it. After the warning period expired, I tried creating a new ID, and it was deleted because it was "associated with a recently deleted account". I might be able to get Amazon.co.uk to work, but that's a lot of work for me, to not get amazon.com and to likely get banned again.

So... for now we have to do without Amazon. Here's how:
- you can search (as always) the BookMooch database
- you will have to "hand enter" a book if it's not in the bookmooch database yet. http://bookmooch.com/m/add_manually

I did some research and I have an idea for a work around. It's going to take a bit of re-enginering from me, but my idea is:

A few days ago, Amazon sent me an email that we were not complying with their terms of service, citing something about our linking to Amazon from social networks. That makes no sense since I don't do this. They subsequently canceled our Amazon API access.

BM uses Amazon as a source for new book data.

At the moment, I've changed BM to use amazon.co.uk, as there doesn't seem to be a problem there.

I'm working to resolve this problem with Amazon, but it might take a while, or not get resolved at all.

In the meantime, if you encounter a page that should work on BM but doesn't, please post info about that here. It's likely that my moving us to use amazon.co.uk wasn't executed perfectly by me, and some bugs remain.

Really sorry about the troubles!

-john

I've added a tiny little feature, to fix something that's annoyed me for years.

When people mooch more than one book from you, this will now be indicated in your "Pending" page with a bold-green line that says "Book 1 of X to (person)". This will help you notice that you need to package up several books in the same box for one person.

I don't know about you, but gawd, there have been so many times when I boxed, sealed and estamped a package, only to find that the next mooch on my pending list is to the person I just packaged up.

So... sigh... either I reopen the package I just finished, and add normal stamps to the total, or I just send another package. That's no good.

Hopefully, with this small change, I (and you) won't make this mistake any more!

Let me know in the comments if I got the programming wrong and the feature misbehaves in some way.

Here's how this looks on the pending page:

This past few weeks, BookMooch has crashed a few times, and I've been having a hard time figuring out why. I think I've found the problem.

There's a user in Italy using the program RSSOwl, and who, on average, requests 144,489 RSS pages every day from BookMooch. Yes, 144 thousand pages!

Now, it's very likely this user didn't realize what they were doing, when they perhaps checked an option to pound the heck out of the server. If you think it's you, can you drop support an email? and they'll help you configure your RSSOwl program to behave.

To guard against this problem, and similar problems in the future, I've limited all RSS users to 100 page requests per day. This seems fairly reasonable to me.

I might put some sort of "max pages you can request per day" limit in the future, say at a big number, such as 1000 per day, if I find other out-of-control programs causing heck.

Sorry for the long delay in figuring this out, but hopefully BookMooch will not crash now. The past two times it crashed (this morning and yesterday) this RSSOwl user was requesting 14 pages per second, so I'm pretty sure they're the cause of the problem.

I recently wrote a blog post Brett Tomlinson's charts and analysis looking at some of the health measurements of BM.

Most things look ok to me, except for the overall decrease of about 15% in mooching this year, vs both the 2008 and 2009 years.

One thing I am thinking about is "monetary policy", or in plain terms, how people earn points on BookMooch.

I read up a *lot* before starting BookMooch, and one of the main problems with other exchange sites was a lack of currency float, which caused the economy to slowly contract, and often ended up with the exchange economy locking up.

Back in 2005, when I was thinking about how points should be earned in BookMooch, I read an article titled "Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op Crisis."

Economist Paul Krugman wrote an excellent article about this babysitter crisis. I quote:

most couples were anxious to add to their reserves by baby-sitting, reluctant to run them down by going out. But one couple's decision to go out was another's chance to baby-sit; so it became difficult to earn coupons. Knowing this, couples became even more reluctant to use their reserves except on special occasions, reducing baby-sitting opportunities still further. In short, the co-op had fallen into a recession. ... eventually ... more coupons were issued, couples became more willing to go out, opportunities to baby-sit multiplied, and everyone was happy. Eventually, of course, the co-op issued too much scrip, leading to different problems ...

As I looked at macro-economic theory, many economists advocate that a growing economy needs inflation in order to fuel that growth.

That's exactly what I did with BookMooch: I made it fairly easy to earn points, and BookMooch experienced very significant growth, partially thanks to that system, with mooches/year peaking at 750,000 mooches/year.

However, an assumption of this macro-economic theory is that steps will be taken in the future to curb inflation once the economy begins to "cool".

BookMooch is now handling about 550,000 mooches/year. This is still great, but does represent a cooling of the book mooching economy.

So... I think this means it's time to consider changes that will curb mooch point inflation.

You can see on this page how points are earned:
http://bookmooch.com/m/points

Points are created when:
1) you type 10 books in (+1)
2) you leave feedback (+0.1)
3) you mooch a book from another country (+1)

Let me write about each of these in turn.

Number 1 is, I believe, not actually inflation. The reason is that inflation is usually defined as a decrease in the buying power of a unit of currency. If you type 10 books into BM, you have added the equivalent of 10 points of "goods", which others can now use to spend their money. This is perhaps debatable, but I don't think I want to change this reward, as it's the main way a) brand new users earn points to get started and b) provides a great incentive to add books to the BM inventory, thus enriching all of us who already have BM points

Number 2 is something I think we could do without. Everyone leaves feedback automatically when they mark a book as received. This isn't a behavior we really need to promote as it is likely to happen without the +0.1 gift.

Number 3 helps promote international mooching, which is a core personal goal of mine. However, with 1 in 5 mooches being an international mooch, this represents a significant source of inflation (110 points created per day).

There are three solutions I see to this problem:

A) balance the cost of international mooches at 2 points cost, 2 points received by the sender

B) balance the cost of international mooches at 3 points cost, 3 points received by the sender

C) create a new charity account for "promoting international mooching" that members would donate to, and leave the current "2 points to mooch, 3 points to the sender" system, but take the point out the charity account rather than creating a new point. This would prevent inflation, but would also depend on a fairly large donation pool (about 40,000 points/year would need to be donated)

Those are my current ideas for decreasing mooch point inflation.

I would like to promote "multimooching", i.e. the mooching of several books from one person at one time. This saves the sender a lot of money in postage costs.

One way to do this is to make the first mooch 1 point, and then knock 10% off the 2nd mooch, and 20% off the 3rd mooch, like so:

Cost of same country mooches:
1st book: 1 point
2nd book: .9 points
3rd book: .8 points
4th book: .7 points
5th book: .6 points
6th book: .5 points thereafter

Cost of International mooches:
1st book: 2 points
2nd book: 1.8 points
3rd book: 1.6 points
4th book: 1.4 points
5th book: 1.2 points
6th book: 1 point thereafter

With this idea, the points received for sending would stay constant at 1 point/same-country or 2 points/international, only the cost would change.

I'm sure this post will provoke strong reactions from some people, so I urge you to keep in mind that

a) these are only thoughts, not policy and

b) my goal here is to have a discussion, not to dictate or to have people flame war.

-john

Ten days ago I hosted my first "Meet and Mooch" in London: [forum:london_moochers] using the Meet and mooch feature.

It was a great success, with about 25 people coming despite the crazy, snowy weather. You can easily organize your own meet and mooch at: http://bookmooch.com/m/meetings -- and it will automatically get promoted to moochers nearby.

What I hadn't expected is that many people brought lots of books that were not (yet) in their BM inventory. These were generally highly-in-demand books that people wanted to give to people they met in person. Or, they were books that people saw on others' wishlists, and were kindly offering from their collection. They didn't want to list them in their inventory, because they didn't want them to be accidentally mooched until after the meeting.

BookMooch doesn't have an easy way to "receive a book face to face". The usual way is to list the book in your inventory, reserve it, and then the other person mooches it, and then finally they mark it as received. Too many steps!

That's why I've added a new feature today: "Face to face".

You can find a button for this feature on the book details page:

How it functions is very simple: you indicate who is giving you this book, and everything else happens in one step.

Here is the "face to face" page:

After your enter the giver's name (or email address) the book is automatically added to their inventory, mooched, one point is transferred and the book is marked as received--all automatically!

I also added this feature to BookMooch Mobile

One other thing I found at the Meet and Mooch, is that I wanted to recommend a book to someone, but had no easy to way to do that with the BookMooch mobile interface. So, today I added a "Recommend this book" button to the mobile interface.

If you're like me, you're always talking about books to your friends, and recommending they read them. Now, you can use your mobile phone and bookmooch to send them an email recommendation in one easy step.

That's it for now!

-john

Searching via Amazon is not working at the moment.

I'm not sure why, yet. The error they are sending back to us is that we are "throttled" for sending too many requests.

I suspect that is not the real reason, but actually it's because Amazon has changed APIs.

Anyhow... I'm working on it now.

To demonstrate the new feature of hosting images on BookMooch new feature: upload files and images I'd like to share a few photos I took recently of a "leave a book, take a book" spot in Saumane de Vaucluse, in France.

Yes, there are fish in there:

If you want to practice using this new feature, post a photo in the comments of a great place where books are being swapped.

I'm using HTML like so, to embed these images in a message:
<img width=800 src="http://bookmooch.com/files/buckman_ca/IMG_6150.jpg">

The New York Times Magazine has a story appearing this Sunday, about ZPM espresso (a kickstarter-backed coffee machine company) and my attempt to buy them when their company ran out of cash.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/magazine/zpm-espresso-and-the-rage-of-the-jilted-crowdfunder.html

Unfortunately, the link to me in the story (at the end) is incorrect, it should be http://decentespresso.com/ but other than that, it's a heck of a good read!

-john

BookMooch is 13 years old this week!

I was in France last week, and hiking I came across a free library with the sign: "LITTLE SHARING LIBRARY: take a book, in exchange, bring one here!"

So similar!

I've had a new project in mind, following in the footsteps of BookMooch, for a few years.

However, there are some parts of the idea that I haven't been able to solve, so I thought I'd post the idea here, start a forum on BM to discuss the idea, and see if all together, we can get the idea far enough evolved that it sounds like it might actually work.

Here's the idea for "Mooch Me" (.com):

Imagine a "mooch" web site, where we all trade favors for things that we love to do anyway. Our passionate hobbies, but not what we do for a living.

These are the activities we which we wish we could spend more time doing, but that we don't necessarily want to do for money.

Here are some activities I do, that I really enjoy, but don't want to make a career out of:

1. I love doing portrait photography, especially of quirky, artsy people, where it's a challenge to get their personality to show through the camera lens.

2. I also enjoy recording classical and folk musicians. So much so, that I created a tiny company to try to do more of it. Doing recordings for money has been fun about half the time, and truly awful the other half of the time.

3. I like doing pottery, but my house is cluttered with stuff I've made, and I'm nowhere near good enough to sell any of it (nor do I want to).

4. And finally, I love advising potential and actual entrepreneurs, and have spoken at many conferences about my ideas. For the right kind of person, my advice is helpful

These are all hobbies I would be happy to practice for someone else's benefit. At the same time, I don't want to get abused. Tricky problem to solve!

Like BookMooch, this would be cashless, with the only way to get favors is to do some yourself.

Everyone contributes.

What do you think of this idea?

Here are some of the problems I'm trying to solve

1. this is a new idea, never (to my knowledge) tried, but there are related ideas, such as Time Banking, and local currencies. However, none of those have focussed on the hobbies people are good at, that they love doing, but that they don't want to do professionally. These are the things that, for many people, give life meaning. When I explain MoochMe to non-moochers, they invariably (mis)interpret as something that's already been done. How can I explain this idea quicker and more clearly?

2. how should the exchange currency work? I dislike the time banking concept of "1 hour spent is 1 hour earned" because, like communism, it doesn't reward improving your efficiency, your quality, and doesn't reward years of effort to get to this point. At the same time, if everyone prices their work with variable "mooch points" this idea could very quickly feel like a marketplace, more like etsy, than a non-professional exchange. Another possibility is for MoochMe to operate without a currency: reputation is all that matters.

3. Many people lack the self-confidence or don't want to make the effort to very clearly describe what they can do. Fiverr.com does a great job of getting around that problem. I like and use Fiverr, but to me that site feels like exploitation, and Fiverr actively discourages the social dimension to the work.

I'd love to know what you think and if you have any ideas for solving the problems above.

If MoochMe sounds like something you'd like to have exist, please join the moochme forum.

-john

I have boxes of BookMooch bookmarks and mooch cards available to all moochers in the USA or Europe. These are available for free to anyone who wants them, for the "price" of a mooch point.

500 bookmarks:
BookMooch : Box of 500 BookMooch Bookmarks

1000 mooch cards (business card sized, fits in your wallet) - only one box in the USA, a few boxes still in the UK.
BookMooch : Box of 1000 BookMooch hand-out cards

and if you want a smaller quantity,

25 hand out cards:
BookMooch : Box of 25 BookMooch hand-out cards

25 bookmarks:
Bookmarks : 25 Bookmooch Bookmarks

If you're in the USA, these will be sent from my house in California right away. If you mooch from the UK, I'll be sending them in mid-March. If you mooch from France, I'll send them in April (when I'll be there).

- john

64 days ago, Amazon shut down our "affiliates" account that allows us to fetch book data from them. My attempts to communicate with a human (by email or phone) went nowhere.

Their original reason for banning BM was that they believed we were advertising on social media and had links directly to Amazon. That didn't make any sense but of course, there's nobody you can talk to.

I worked around that by creating a new account.

Today, Amazon has shut down my new account, as they've figured out that it's related to BM. Sigh.

We have taken this step because we have previously closed an account that we have determined belongs to you or a person affiliated with you or acting in concert with you for violations of the Associates Program Operating Agreement, the Product Advertising API License Agreement, or one of the other Associates Programs operated by our affiliates.

The good news is that BM has 10 years of book data from Amazon.com. The bad news is that I can't now get new book data from Amazon.com. I can, however, get new data from Amazon.co.uk and the other non-USA Amazon sites (shrug).

I'm going to keep trying to find a way to talk to someone at Amazon, but I'm not hopeful. If you follow the news, you'll find lots of people find Amazon a bit difficult to "work with".

Technically, because of this annoyance, what I have now changed is that searches for books that don't exist on BM will use the Amazon.co.uk database instead of Amazon.com. It's not a perfect solution, but it's not too bad. Already existing books will continue to link to Amazon. Many American editions are listed at Amazon.co.uk.

My opinion is that this is what happens when 40% of American Internet purchases go to one company, and I'll leave it at that. Only Google, it seems, can win in a fight with Amazon: http://www.businessinsider.com/roku-google-vs-amazon-youtube-fight-2017-12

-john

I've rewritten the recent books feature, so it now works again, and is completely Twitter-free. I've done it in a very visual style, with cover art and a variety of fonts. Hopefully more people will like what I've done with the "look" of "recent books" than those who dislike it!

Take a look at it at:
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent

You can also search inside the recent books, for any text that appears on the page, and only books that match all your conditions will be displayed.

For example, if you search for "romance united states":
http://bookmooch.com/m/recent?search=romance+united+states

you'll only get books that mention "romance" that also mention "united states".

The "search" feature is really useful if you only want to see books that are in your country.

The "recent books" page automatically refreshes every minute. You might have a slight screen blink when the page refreshes: in a later iteration of the feature, I'll fix that.

A few things to note:

1) any book that is added that is on someone's wishlist is not displayed in "recent books" until the wishlist members have received their email notification. This is so that existing members, who have built up their wishlists, have precedence.

2) any book that is not on any wishlist, is displayed right away on "recent books". This could potentially be a problem if someone adds a lot of books and doesn't realize how many mooches they'll get, but I feel that negative is balanced off by the quick mooching of books you've added to your inventory, so that while you're still using the BM web site, the pending mooches start coming in.

3) any books that are mooched, or removed from inventory, are automatically removed from the "recent books" feed. Only moochable books are displayed.

4) the country where the book is located is displayed on "recent books". However, this doesn't necessarily mean that this person will send to you. I *could* change this, and only display moochable-by-you books. It's a bit of work on my part, but it would be useful, so I'm thinking of it.

5) I know that people asked for RSS feeds, and I'll be adding that feature shortly. I also need to update the API for this new feature (the recent books API call is currently not working).

6) The page looks best in a recent web browser that can accept custom fonts. It does work with IE6 and IE8, but it doesn't look as nice.

7) the cover art is "retina display" compatible, so if you use a high resolution tablet, laptop or phone, the cover art will look stunning, even as you zoom in on the page.

8) I'm going to see what I can do to have more books display cover art.

I think that's all I have to report for now... let me know your thoughts!

-john

I was on vacation last week, totally "off the grid" at the Burning Man festival.

And of course.... the one time I can't use the internet is the one time that BookMooch decided to act up. Usually (in past years) this has been caused by the launch of some new search engine that maniacally crawls all of BookMooch, thus slowing it down a lot.

I'm back in the real world now, and will shepherd BookMooch back to happiness!

On another topic, at Burning Man I ran an "art piece", which was projecting ambient light sculptures I've made this year, onto a 20ft dome, so that the light appeared in a sea of surrounding darkness. There's a very short youtube video of it below. It's part of a hopefully-to-some-day-finish project I'm calling "Pixcycler.com" which will help you you reuse the under-used screens in your home to display art.

There's a super-secret feature I've had all to myself for some time: the ability to upload files (and images) to BookMooch, so they can be included in forum postings and book descriptions.

To access this feature, go to:
http://bookmooch.com/m/files

I haven't previously published this feature, because I was worried about abuse (ie, hosting pirated music or something). But, it's only available to members, so let's give it a try and see how things go.

Sorry about the lack of warning, but yesterday BM was down for a few hours as I pulled out the old dead servers, from 15 years of being in the same server colocation space.

I also bought a big battery backup and plugged BM into it. There was a power outage a few months back that rebooted all the servers, and BM was down from that. I wanted to try to avoid that in the future.

Here's my in the weirdly surreal colocation space where BM lives.

In redoing the recent books feature to be more graphical, I started noticing that a lot of books at BM don't have book cover graphics, but do have covers visible at Amazon.

I researched this a bit, and it turns out to simply be that Amazon has added a LOT of book covers to their database, and since BM only reads the Amazon database when the book is first added to BM, we haven't been seeing all the new covers Amazon has added.

Also, I noticed that Amazon has really cleaned up their crazy "Topics" data, on many books, which is a continual source of irritation to moochers.

So, I've made a few changes to help with this problem:

1) every time a book is added to an inventory or a wishlist, if the Amazon data is older than a day, BM now automatically checks to see if Amazon has updated info about the book.

2) there is a "refresh data" button on every book details page, that you can click. If the book details are pretty scarce (ie, no cover, no description), you can click it, and if Amazon has data now, it'll plop right into BM! Go ahead and click "refresh data" on all the books in your inventory or wishlist, if you want to see more covers!

3) And finally, I'm having BM do a refresh of every book in all inventories. Once that's done, I'll do a refresh of all wishlists and save-for-later too. As there are 12 million books in BM, and it takes about 1 second to fetch the data from Amazon, it'd take 133 days to refresh all the books in BM's database. Since we don't want to wait that long, I'm prioritizing books-that-can-be-mooched first.

All in all, this should give us a much more graphical mooching experience!

-john

BookMooch has been a bit slow these past 24h, and I'm working to fix the problem.

The cause: TONS of different TCP/IP addresses crawling the http://bookmooch.es site, going to every page. It's very hard for me to block this, because I can't see any logic to it.

However, I did notice that a lot of the slowness is from these "Crawlers" hitting every single "zip code" on BookMooch. Since this is a very USA-focussed feature (5 digit postal codes) it doesn't make sense for these crawlers to be even asking for this data on the bookmooch.es site.

So... to solve this problem for the time being, I have disabled the "zip" pages, and also the "member history" pages, when you are *not logged in as a member*

If you are logged in as a member, you won't see any problem.

These "web site crawlers" are not logged in as members, so I can try to discriminate against them, and not give them access to the slowest pages on BM.

-john

Ten years ago, BookMooch was born!

Admittedly, due to eBooks, traditional books are no longer at their peak, but they're not gone yet! Here are some interesting stats, as of today:

1. Total books mooched in 10 years: 3,971,409
   
2. Books currently on their way to moochers right now: 6,096
   
3. People who have given books: 106,223
   
4. Active members listing books to give: 14,217
   
5. Book titles available for mooching: 198,318

At this point, BookMooch's software is fairly "mature" and I only fiddle with it now and then. Mark runs the administration side of things. I run this server on a spare space next to my other projects.

I'm currently living in Hong Kong, where I'm running my little espresso machine company Decent Espresso.