Better World Books
May 7, 2008
On monday I had dinner with Xavier Helgesen, one of the cofounders of Better World Books. He lives in San Francisco but was coming through London, so we ended up meeting in London rather than our California homes.
What Better World Books does is truly amazing, and deserves all the success it has had, which is considerable, and I think BookMooch is going to work with them in the future.
What they do is work with charities that run book drives, collecting all the books that remain unsold by the charity at the end of the book drive. They then find the best homes they can for those remaining books, either by selling the books (and raising money for the charity or through other charitable donations).
What this concretely means is that they list the books on eBay and Amazon and on their own website, and pay back a significant percentage of any money that comes in from those sales back to the charity. In this way, they greatly increase the amount of money a charity can receive from a book drive, and they also prevents the waste of large numbers of books. I remember reading about how a local hospital sent all the unsold books from their book drive to the trash dump, and how upset I was to learn that.
Of the books that are not sold, if it is a textbook, then it goes to Books for Africa, where extremely current textbooks are really in demand and in short supply.
They also have deals with volume used book purchasers, who will buy the remaining fiction books by the pound. That’s much better then throwing the books away, and the charity of course gets their percentage. Only in the last resort are are the books sent to be recycled.
Their numbers are extremely impressive and posted publicly on their website.
* Collected over 11.4 million books through active book drives at over 1,600 colleges and universities and collections from over 900 libraries
* Raised over $2.8 million for over 80 literacy and education non-profit organizations,
* Raised more than $1.7 million for libraries and thrift stores nationwide
* Directly sent more than 1 million books to Books for Africa, the National Center for Family Literacy, and Feed the Children
* Contributed more than $1 million to college service clubs who have run book drives
And that’s just a subset of what their web page lists.
BookMooch & Better World Books Partnership ideas
Xavier And I got along famously, and came up with several partnership ideas between Better World Books and BookMooch. I’d love to get some feedback on them!
Here is what we are thinking of doing:
* Giving to moochers: Better World Books would become a BookMooch member, and list books (those they cannot sell) for mooching. This helps increase the catalog of books on BookMooch. Eventually they would list almost their entire catalog of 1 million titles! Less books going to the dump, and a better selection for mooching. Initially, they’d start out small, to make sure that moochers are happy with the experience, but since their goal is to find a home for each book they receive, BookMooch is perfect for them.
* Mooching books: By earning these mooch points honestly, they also earn the right to mooch books that they can sell (or send the book to a charity they work with that really needs it). A healthy percentage of those proceeds go to charity. Since they are extremely successful at finding buyers for very obscure books, I think this will help moochers give away books that we don’t yet have an audience for, while both supporting both a business I like and raising money for charities.
* Bulk receiving of books: if you have boxes of books and do not want to bother entering them into BookMooch, Better World Books will accept whatever books you postal mail to them in whatever quantity you want, and pay you in book mooch points. What I suggested is some sort of automated pay scale like this: a) if the book title has been mooched in the past month, then pay a one mooch point, b) if the book title has been mooched in the past six months, then pay one half a much point, otherwise pay .1 mooch points. A lot of people on the forums, and in person to me, have asked if there was a way BookMooch could take a bulk shipment of books off their hands. This would of course be voluntary, and only for people who don’t want to be bothered listing books in BookMooch and sending them one at a time.
Thoughts?
There are a lot of comments on this blog entry, and this morning I was quite pleased to find that Xavier has replied directly on the forum. Since it’s his company being talked about, I’m also reproducing his reply here in the blog body itself, so it gets extra attention:
| From: Xavier Helgesen
Hi all- Thanks for all the feedback. As John mentioned, we had a great discussion, and I’m happy to be involved. We’re definitely looking forward to getting more involved with the BookMooch community and finding ways to add value. The core of our model is creating value for all stakeholders: customers, non-profits, partners, employees and anyone else we work with. I’ll try to address as any questions raised as I can - please let me know if I missed anything. Also, I encourage people to contact me personally. There seems to be a lot of conjecture about what Better World Books is and isn’t online. I’m always happy to have a chat about the company, as I feel very strongly about the positive impact we make, and I don’t see us as any threat to small booksellers. Even if we grew by a factor of 10, we’d be a very, very small part of the book market. My email is pretty easy to guess: xavier at {company URL} Cam: THANK YOU! Please keep checking with us first for affordable used books - if you email me, I’ll send you the friends & family discount code. Any others reading the comments are welcome to request this as well. Jon & Ashleigh: Thanks for your posts - that is exactly how I think is the best way for things to work. We’ll act as a responsible member of the community, just like any other. Regarding shipping books to UK & Canada: This is something that we’re looking strongly at. We’re going to roll the program out first in the USA, and proceed from there. There may be ways we can cover part/all of the cost of shipping to us, but we would have to do it based on the value of the books sent. There are a great deal of books in the world that are very hard to resell and are not of much use to our literacy partners. Advanced Readers Copies: Those are tough for us, as the publishers really push hard on reselling them, and they are not the final versions of the books. So generally we have to politely decline those books. Regarding Emily Thayer’s Points: We are a for-profit social venture, and we make no bones about it. We’re very clear about this on our website. We are not a publicly traded company however - we are independent, and owned primarily by founders and employees. We pride ourselves on providing health insurance for all employees after 90 days (which is VERY expensive for a small company like ours) and paying fair wages. We also would love to work with you on a local level - we offer warehouse pickup of books on BetterWorld.com, and we’re happy to work out bulk sales discounts and other arrangements to support our local booksellers. Just follow the bulk sales link on the site. I’m sure if you stopped by and met us, you’d see that we’re nice people, and we’re certainly not a “big business” of the ilk of Wal-Mart. We are very proud to be part of the Mishawaka community and try to engage any way we can. We encourage our employees to volunteer, and have partnerships including with the Center for the Homeless and the Robinson Community Learning Center. We have also created over 100 jobs in the community, ranging from picking orders to writing software. Regarding our participation: As I mentioned before, our participation in BookMooch only makes sense to the degree that we add value to the community. If some members want books that there is not enough demand for on our sales channels, and there are other books we can receive in return that our customers do want, that seems to be a win-win to me. As the system is very cleverly designed, we’ll only be able to receive books to the extent that we provide books that members want. I’m not sure yet whether our inventory will be a good match, but I suspect that it will. Also, the program for people to send books in will not be for everyone. We’ll have to see if it is useful, and adjust it if it is not. I can’t see how people could object to it, as it is an optional program and certainly it doesn’t hurt if it exists. Regarding Mark William’s post: Mark, you rightly mention that Books For Africa is a top-notch publicly accountable charity. The fact that our programs are both the largest source of funding and University-level books for Books For Africa ought to tell you something. We are fully transparent with our non-profit partners, and you can feel free to independently verify this and contact them. I highly encourage anyone who wants to front the postage or lives in the Minneapolis area to donate books direct to Books For Africa. I serve on the board of the organization and it has been an exceptional privilege. You do have a few facts mixed up - we sell almost all of our books on consignment for non-profits and libraries, and we pay a percentage of gross, not net. The commission varies, since we cover all costs associated with the book collections. Since we are a nationwide program, there are many costs associated with book collection and inbound shipping that are always going to be higher than a local operation. The strength of our program is really the scale - most local booksellers cannot take on 20,000 books at once and sell them effectively. They would typically have to “cherry pick” the best books and recycle the rest. Because of our scale, we are able to handle these kind of volumes, and that is a reason a lot of libraries have chosen to work with us. Finally, I can assure you that our profits are not in the 10’s of millions. As I’ve mentioned in a blog comment on another site (where they wanted to see the cars and houses of the founders), I rent and don’t own a car. We have relatively small margins after the amount we share with our literacy partners, and reinvest a great deal in our people, our software, and spreading the word about Better World Books. Sincerely, |
John writes: I found the comment below to be really fascinating, so I’m reproducing it in the body of this blog as well:
| As a BookMooch charity and a non-profit partner of Better World Books, the Prison Book Program has a unique perspective on this issue.
Better World Books has been selling books we cannot use since 2004 and we have found them to be a great partner. To date they have raised over $25,000 for us which accounts for over 33% of our budget and has funded shipments to more than 8000 prisoners. We get 30% of the revenues for the books they sell on our behalf. Yes, that is relatively small, but when you consider that they pay for everything from the shipping of our books to their warehouse to the handling of the purchases, it is more than fair. We have tried selling books on our own through Amazon, through local booksellers and by running our own book sales. All proved to be far too much effort for way too little gain. BWB brings economy of scale to non-profit book selling in the same way Amazon brings it to book-selling in general. Many may not consider that a good thing, but we most certainly do. The person that manages our relationship with BWB works in the publishing industry. She has met the CEO and founders and visited their facility in South Bend, Indiana. She found them to be genuinely dedicated to funding literacy efforts and was quite impressed with their operation. They are also a recent recipient of Fast Company Magazine’s social entrepreneur award. I worked for a non-profit that received this award several years in a row. I can say that Fast Company does not award this honor lightly. The recipients are changing the world in powerful ways and are doing it honestly and efficiently. BookMooch has also been a boon to us in the ~6 months we have been an official charity. We have mooched over 350 books and nearly all of these are so in-demand that they are sent to a prisoner within a week of receiving them. Because of BookMooch we have been able to dramatically improve the quality of reading material we send out. We have mooched dictionaries (which prisoners use to teach themselves to read), almanacs, self-help and religious materials of all kinds, business books and many more. When an inmate learns to read or start a business or gets his GED or improves his mental state, he is far more likely to have a successful life on the outside – and because of legions of generous BookMoochers we are able to provide many more of these hard-to-find titles than we have in the past. Unfortunately, we (and the other prison book charities) regularly clean out BM’s inventory of these books. Having more available would be fantastic! BWB and BookMooch joining forces would make more of these titles available to everyone. We pre-screen the books we send to BWB to weed out the un-saleable ones – so I am very familiar with the books they deem un-saleable and could become available on BookMooch. While some are the same MMPs that likely are sitting in everyone’s inventories for months, a great number of them are non-fiction titles that would go in minutes on BookMooch. BWB has increased the quantity of books we send out. BookMooch has improved the quality. Working together, they may be able to do more of both. It sounds like there are many details to be thought out and considered before going forward with this plan, but I do hope that two of our favorite partners will find a way to work together. They would make a powerful team that would benefit the entire community. Marlene Cook |
May 7, 2008 at 8:42 am
Sounds like a great partnership. I would love to have my obscure books mooched, and this sounds like one more way of that happening for Moochers worldwide.
Thanks for all that you do, and for keeping up updated.
May 7, 2008 at 9:39 am
Sounds like a great idea!
May 7, 2008 at 10:19 am
I think this is a fantastic idea. I always check Better World first for books, and I think this is a great opportunity to support their cause!
May 7, 2008 at 11:14 am
Great ideas!
May 7, 2008 at 11:47 am
Sounds very exciting…a great way for a charity to benefit as we gain more inventory
May 7, 2008 at 11:53 am
Sounds great, could the books be sent to a central point in the UK ?
I work at a secondary school and we have loads of books left over from Christmas Fairs that could go to Better World Books, then we could use the points for our school library.
Excellent idea.
May 7, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Hi,
I ran a booksale at the elementary school where I teach and (surprise surprise) had hundreds of books left over. After donating to community groups, I still have many boxes left, but cannot afford to ship them anywhere with Canada Post’s exhorbitant rates. Is there another way to donate them that doesn’t involve a cash outlay? I am storing them because it breaks my heart to recycle them, but I can’t do this much longer. Any suggestions?
Thanks, and thank you so much for this site - it is a wonderful initiative!
Kathryn
May 7, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I like it.
Would A Better World accept advanced reader’s copies? I’m a bookseller, and I drown in them every quarter. I end up listing some on BookMooch, but for every one I put here, there’s another twenty in a pile either at work or at my house.
May 7, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Hello John,
I was pretty unhappy to see this post.
You might love BWB, however it is competition for the little owner/operator booksellers that you have professed to favor, John. I am doing the exact same thing you suggest, on a smaller scale. BWB is NOT a charity, although they may work with charities to collect books. They are a publicly traded company, run for profit. They omit this very important information on a number of their promotional materials. Just Google it if you don’t believe me. Adding BWB to BookMooch is going to hurt me as a bookseller using your site, and all the other single-person/single-family businesses that are already here.
They give to charity, yes. So do I. So does Wal-Mart, and Target, and any number of big-box stores.
I’m not saying don’t have a partnership with them, however you should also know that BWB isn’t very friendly in the neighborhood. I live - quite literally - 1 mile away from their Mishawaka warehouse, and they won’t let buyers pick up books at the door to save shipping charges. Furthermore they solicit donations of books through the company that holds the recycling contract for the city, and get free books, from that free advertising.
I can’t compete with that. Big business, once again, wins over the little guy. Are the employees paid living wages and provided health insurance? I think there are a few questions that were conveniently glossed over here.
Sincerely,
Emily Thayer
dba Thayer Books
May 7, 2008 at 12:42 pm
While I would certainly like to see more charitable giving on Bookmooch, as most of us would, I believe Better World Books is not the best partner for this as they have garnered considerable criticism as they have continued to expand their enterprise and increasingly compete with non-profit charitable groups which have been conducting book drives for years.
Better World has conducted book drives on several campuses I’ve been associated with and were roundly criticized as they essentially present themselves as a charitable organization, as seems to be the case with the current version of their website, but they are actually a for-profit (mentioned less prominently) company with $16 million in revenue last year alone and with the owners drawing six figure salaries. There is the appearance that most profits go to charitable non-profits, but they appear to only give about 10% of net profits (not gross), and also compete with many purely non-profit groups which had previously held book drives. It is laudable that they have given about $500 k a year over their five years of operation, but is is quite misleading to announce this so prominently while not also stating their total gross and net profits which appear to be in the tens of millions of dollars due to their enormous volume.
My experience was with university book drives and the previously existing groups which lost out to this for-profit company, but there has also been criticism of the low-ball deals struck with many library book sales around the country for which they purchase mass qualities of books at very low rates.
Better World also does not state what percentage of donated books are disposed of, but claims that they recycle rather than dispose of excess books (in the millions it appears). But this does not validate claims of massive carbon offsetting, as so many of these books would not have been taken to land fills as suggested. Most responsible libraries and university book groups recycle unwanted books.
Books-for-Africa, on the other hand, is a well known non-profit group that has collected 15 million+ books with full public accountability and no complaints of profiting from their endeavours. As with any major charitable organization, they operate with full transparency.
So, I think Bookmooch members would be much better served in donating books directly to these truly non-profit organizations. I think the notion of sending books in bulk to our existing Bookmooch charities is a good one, and think the prison charities, in particular, would be open to this idea. Further, I would like to see Books-for Africa and more like them join Bookmoch as charities, which I’m sure they would be glad to do. We all cull our inventories or get large groups of books which could be sent directly to a charity like them.
I also think that if our existing charities have more assistant in tracking down books of interest on Bookmooch, that they could acquire many more books. To this end, some of us who have been around here for a while can act as surrogate moochers for a charity we are in communication with.
So we could function much like Better World in diverting books from disposal towards charitable ends, but it seems we already have the mechanism in place to be the middle men in this process, rather than allow a for-profit company to do this for us with no public accountability.
May 7, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I can’t express my objections to this proposal as well as the prior posts, but still want to register my opposition to this idea. BWB makes their charity efforts highly visible but they are still a high-volume, for-profit bookseller. I view allowing them on BM about the same way I would view allowing Amazon or B&N to list here. Definitely, not a good idea.
May 7, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I like the three-part structure that you propose, John. But I have to agree with the other comments that such partnerships ought to be limited to genuine non-profits, so as to maintain the delicate balance with small for-profit booksellers.
May 7, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I’ve long been opposed to spending my hard earned cash at the USPS so that someone else can make a buck from my book. I’ve had to “get-over-it” with small scale booksellers on BookMooch. This may be the proverbial straw for me. I’d rather just give my books to people I know & local charities.
May 7, 2008 at 3:14 pm
dottie is absolutely right.
May 7, 2008 at 4:08 pm
So, if this went as proposed, I could send say, 10 or 20 of my not so popular books to BWB, which would cost ‘an arm and a leg’. They would get the books for free and could then make more money on them, and all I get is 1 or 2 bookmooch points because my books weren’t very popular. And I get the satisfaction of knowing my books might finally get to someone who will love them….or they might still not….since they weren’t so popular, they might still end up destroyed….recycled, of course, but BWB gets the money for the recycling, instead of me.
I of course love the idea of expanding the BookMooch inventory so that I have more chances of getting my wishlisted books, and I can see, John, how this sounded like a great idea at first. But it looks like there are some hitches. It doesn’t sound all that fair.
May 7, 2008 at 4:31 pm
To add to my above comment- Come to think of it, at .1 point per unpopular book, I wouldn’t get any BM points for sending them to BWB, because I’d already have lost .1 point per book for removing them from my inventory.
May 7, 2008 at 4:35 pm
BTW, I like the new little colored quilt patterns for easily telling comments apart on this blog! Great idea. You can tell me apart from the earlier Rachel.
May 7, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Wait, what’s the point in sending a big (heavy, expensive to send) box of books to a company to deal with them, when I only get .1 points per book? At that point it would be cheaper (and probably more environmentally friendly, considering the transport costs) to just dump them in the recycling - which it seems to me that BWB does on a regular basis. So I just shipped out books at my own expense for someone else to recycle them, while I could have held on to them for a few months and maybe got a 3-point international mooch instead of a 0.1.
While I understand that bulk-adding would be beneficial for some people, this doesn’t seem to me to be the right way to go about it.
And can’t we just send our books to Africa if that’s what we want to do with them? Why introduce yet another middle man? I’ve never had the negative experiences with BWB that other members have described, so I’m not against them in theory. I don’t have a problem with them per se - but you’re selling this like it would be a great deal for BookMooch members, and I’m not seeing that. I would, however, be open to more convincing.
In a completely and utterly unrelated note: would it be possible to get province markers for Canadians, like Americans have for their states? So that my name would be Caitlin (CA: ON) like someone could be Mary (US:IL)? It’s a huge country, and domestic shipping increases by distance, while international shipping increases only by weight (unless you’re going for priority shipping). Sending a book to BC is more expensive than sending it to California, for someone who lives in the eastern provinces - I’d like to be able to see where the people I’m mooching from live, so that I could pick a book from Ontario over one from BC, if possible. Being able to do so would hopefully be able to reduce the amount of money Canadians spend to send books in Canada, and also reduce the distance those books have to travel. (I also think it would be interesting to see the distribution of BookMooch members by province!)
I don’t mean to sidetrack the discussion here, and I’m sorry if I have, but, um, pretty please?
May 7, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I think I would be curious to see what BWB’s bottom-barrel, absolutely-can-not-sell books would be. I mean, if they want to flood us with the same mmps that we’ve got in the hundreds already, and in return get nice, saleable books, I have to admit I’m not too crazy for it. As others have said (far more eloquently) they are a company out for money, not a charity, and so I don’t think they should get any preferential treatment. I suppose if they want to join the site as a regular user, and mooch and trade with the rest of us, it’s fair game. Heck, if they can knock some books off my wishlist I’ll be happy. But as a general rule I’m not crazy about booksellers using BookMooch as their unsellable dumping ground, and I know others feel the same.
May 7, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I honestly don’t have much to say except to very strongly agree with Emily, Mark, Rachel, Caitlin, Suzi, and everyone else who is against this. BAD IDEA.
May 7, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Please don’t just toss unpopular books in any old dumpsters; toss them in recycling paper dumpsters!
May 7, 2008 at 7:21 pm
I don’t think Better World Books should be given special treatment — positive or negative. I don’t like the idea of BookMooch setting up special deals with a for-profit company, but regular membership is another matter.
BookMooch’s methods for encouraging good behavior are simple and seem to work pretty well. The feedback, mooching ratio, and abuse-reporting safeguards would keep Better World Books in line just as those safeguards keep regular members in line.
If Better World Books can list books that people want to mooch and if they pay points for the books they mooch, then I don’t see the dynamics as being any different from any other member. If they offer books no one wants, then the books won’t get mooched and Better World Books won’t earn points. If they don’t give good service they will get negative feedback and people won’t mooch from them. They may want to mooch the best books for resale, but they would have no better chance to get those books than any other member who wants them.
The issues related to Better World Books becoming a member are analogous to the BookSwim controversy of several months ago, and I see some of the same concerns raised now as were raised then. If a company is going to be judged more harshly than an individual then it can simply get employees to join as individuals. Is that worth trying to police? It’s impractical (and unfair) to treat a company differently than an individual. Where would the line be drawn between a bookseller that’s okay and bookseller that’s not okay?
Did Bookswim live up to any of the fears people expressed when it became a member? Have any booksellers had a negative impact on BookMooch? I think any person or company that joins increases the number of moochable books and should be welcomed. If they become a bad citizen they should be kicked out, just like any other member.
John, This blog post exemplifies one of the great things about BookMooch. You ask for members’ opinions about changes and weigh their responses before you act. I think that’s wonderful. Thank you.
Jon
May 7, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Although BWB has good itentions, I think that if they are to participate on Bookmooch, they should operate as either a normal trading member with inforamtion on their biography page if anyone wishes to make bulk donations.
May 7, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Sorry, I hit the submit button before I was finished. If Jon wishes they could operate as a charity and then it would be up to the individual BM members to decide whether to support BWB or not.
May 7, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Hi all-
Thanks for all the feedback. As John mentioned, we had a great discussion, and I’m happy to be involved. We’re definitely looking forward to getting more involved with the BookMooch community and finding ways to add value. The core of our model is creating value for all stakeholders: customers, non-profits, partners, employees and anyone else we work with. I’ll try to address as any questions raised as I can - please let me know if I missed anything. Also, I encourage people to contact me personally. There seems to be a lot of conjecture about what Better World Books is and isn’t online. I’m always happy to have a chat about the company, as I feel very strongly about the positive impact we make, and I don’t see us as any threat to small booksellers. Even if we grew by a factor of 10, we’d be a very, very small part of the book market. My email is pretty easy to guess: xavier at {company URL}
Cam: THANK YOU! Please keep checking with us first for affordable used books - if you email me, I’ll send you the friends & family discount code. Any others reading the comments are welcome to request this as well.
Jon & Ashleigh: Thanks for your posts - that is exactly how I think is the best way for things to work. We’ll act as a responsible member of the community, just like any other.
Regarding shipping books to UK & Canada: This is something that we’re looking strongly at. We’re going to roll the program out first in the USA, and proceed from there. There may be ways we can cover part/all of the cost of shipping to us, but we would have to do it based on the value of the books sent. There are a great deal of books in the world that are very hard to resell and are not of much use to our literacy partners.
Advanced Readers Copies: Those are tough for us, as the publishers really push hard on reselling them, and they are not the final versions of the books. So generally we have to politely decline those books.
Regarding Emily Thayer’s Points: We are a for-profit social venture, and we make no bones about it. We’re very clear about this on our website. We are not a publicly traded company however - we are independent, and owned primarily by founders and employees. We pride ourselves on providing health insurance for all employees after 90 days (which is VERY expensive for a small company like ours) and paying fair wages. We also would love to work with you on a local level - we offer warehouse pickup of books on BetterWorld.com, and we’re happy to work out bulk sales discounts and other arrangements to support our local booksellers. Just follow the bulk sales link on the site. I’m sure if you stopped by and met us, you’d see that we’re nice people, and we’re certainly not a “big business” of the ilk of Wal-Mart.
We are very proud to be part of the Mishawaka community and try to engage any way we can. We encourage our employees to volunteer, and have partnerships including with the Center for the Homeless and the Robinson Community Learning Center. We have also created over 100 jobs in the community, ranging from picking orders to writing software.
Regarding our participation: As I mentioned before, our participation in BookMooch only makes sense to the degree that we add value to the community. If some members want books that there is not enough demand for on our sales channels, and there are other books we can receive in return that our customers do want, that seems to be a win-win to me. As the system is very cleverly designed, we’ll only be able to receive books to the extent that we provide books that members want. I’m not sure yet whether our inventory will be a good match, but I suspect that it will. Also, the program for people to send books in will not be for everyone. We’ll have to see if it is useful, and adjust it if it is not. I can’t see how people could object to it, as it is an optional program and certainly it doesn’t hurt if it exists.
Regarding Mark William’s post: Mark, you rightly mention that Books For Africa is a top-notch publicly accountable charity. The fact that our programs are both the largest source of funding and University-level books for Books For Africa ought to tell you something. We are fully transparent with our non-profit partners, and you can feel free to independently verify this and contact them. I highly encourage anyone who wants to front the postage or lives in the Minneapolis area to donate books direct to Books For Africa. I serve on the board of the organization and it has been an exceptional privilege.
You do have a few facts mixed up - we sell almost all of our books on consignment for non-profits and libraries, and we pay a percentage of gross, not net. The commission varies, since we cover all costs associated with the book collections. Since we are a nationwide program, there are many costs associated with book collection and inbound shipping that are always going to be higher than a local operation. The strength of our program is really the scale - most local booksellers cannot take on 20,000 books at once and sell them effectively. They would typically have to “cherry pick” the best books and recycle the rest. Because of our scale, we are able to handle these kind of volumes, and that is a reason a lot of libraries have chosen to work with us.
Finally, I can assure you that our profits are not in the 10’s of millions.
As I’ve mentioned in a blog comment on another site (where they wanted to see the cars and houses of the founders), I rent and don’t own a car. We have relatively small margins after the amount we share with our literacy partners, and reinvest a great deal in our people, our software, and spreading the word about Better World Books.
Sincerely,
Xavier
Co-Founder, Better World Books
—————————-
Fund literacy, care for the environment, and get a fair price on the books you want.
BetterWorld.com (http://www.BetterWorld.com/)
2 Million New & Used Books. Free shipping in the USA, $2.97 worldwide.
—————————-
May 7, 2008 at 9:09 pm
I sometimes use BetterWorld, but I agree with Jon Maloney that they should be treated like a regular member. Otherwise, it’s completely unfair!!! I’m would not be willing to give up books for that kind of structured mooch point system. You’d be surprised what gets mooched. I’d rather wait.
But just one more thing — BetterWorld books does not charge anything for shipping books to the US. I’m unsure what Emily above was talking about with regard to saving on costs of shipping.
May 7, 2008 at 9:27 pm
Others have said it quite well, I think, so I’ll just add my voice to the “don’t do it” side. Just let them be a regular bookmooch member, with no special treatment.
May 7, 2008 at 9:29 pm
While I don’t personally have any experience with BWB, I do echo and understand the comments that others have made in response to your blog post John. And while I do not condemn, I do realize that because of their size they have the buying power to get to books (or at books) that I (and other small time book dealers — and I am only selling old textbooks anyway — would not be able to get to).
Now, am I book dealer, and do I have a bookstore? Well, I have a few titles for sale here and there, and no, I have no physical bookstore, but in the interest of saving books, I do like picking things up OFF Freecycle, Yard Sales, Craigslist, etc. Some get sold, some go on BookMooch, etc. What BWB will try to do is NOT any different, BUT what IS different is their size, and what WILL be UNFAIR, as other small time owners of bookshops who are also book lovers have pointed out is this:
Due to their size, they will be able to get on here and get books that nobody else wants, AND maybe even make money OFF of them.
Throwing the books away is not the answer. BUT, giving them to BWB for their profit, doesn’t sound very appetizing.
I have always thought, we could maybe develop a system to send books we don’t want to a charity for 1/2 a point or even a 1/4 of a point. That to me is more logical.
Anyway, that is just my opinion. Again, I do not have a storefront per see, nor can I compete with BWB, nor am I completely against the idea, BUT… this needs to be re-looked at. Sure, they can flood BM with all the Wish Listed books every one wants, but then what???
May 7, 2008 at 10:04 pm
I hate the idea that I might loose out on a mooch of a book I really want to keep for myself just so someone can sell it (for charity or not).
May 7, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Jon Maloney wrote:
“If they offer books no one wants, then the books won’t get mooched and Better World Books won’t earn points. ”
Except that if they can list thousands and thousands of books (that they can’t sell! that they would normally just recycle!), they WILL get the .1s for that, and with John B. saying they will eventually list ONE MILLION books, that’s a lot of points. So it won’t really matter if their books get mooched, ’cause they will have plenty of points to snag “for profit” books.
John B wrote:
“significant percentage” “healthy percentage”
You used those words to describe how much BWB is giving back to the charities they are getting the books from. But what does that mean, in terms of numbers? If Mark W. has it correct, they are only giving back about 10%.
Seriously? 10%? I don’t know how 10% could be considered “significant” or “healthy.” Sounds pretty freakin’ skimpy to me, ESPECIALLY if they are picking up those books from the charities for free.
Those charities probably could have gotten an equivelent amount if they had sold their left over books directly to a recycling company.
John B said:
“Better World Books would become a BookMooch member, and list books (those they cannot sell) for mooching.”
Wait, they are going to list a million books that they can’t sell? Which means they are titles that are over glutted in the market place, which means they are probably over glutted here (Do we need another 25,000 Dan Brown copies? Probably not.), or they are in such bad shape that they can’t get people to buy them. Neither of them sound like very appealing options.
BWB’s website works very hard to come across as a non-profit. They aren’t. That’s pretty dang deceptive of them. This just feels skeezy somehow.
~Aramada
May 8, 2008 at 12:17 am
I think it fair that BWB be allowed to operate an account like any other individual on Bookmooch. And that they be subject to all the same rules that each of us must follow to participate in the BM community.
Such as the 2:1 ratio limit.
If they list wanted books and send them then they will have plenty of points to spend as they see fit.
But that we should ask them to kindly not make the kind of misleading claims of being primarily a charitable entity as their website does.
Books-for-Africa, on the other hand could be welcomed as a new Bookmooch charity, and I would like to see a feature which will allow us to give boxes of books directly to them and other Bookmooch charities.
May 8, 2008 at 12:52 am
For the reasons presented above, I dislike the whole idea very much. Another reason I dislike it is that is seems so wasteful of shipping ( and not good for the carbon footprint they profess to care about) to have books donated or mooched shipped to them so they list sell and reship. If bookmooch grows enough, there will be more new happy direct owners of any hard to find rare books which are not finding demand right now on bookmooch ( if that is really an issue).
I do have another idea, a very sketchy where bookmooch users could sponsor any book selling charity, imagine person A wishlists a book which is available and relatively cheap to buy from some charity. Maybe some sort of scheme could be done where bookmoocher B could offer to buy that book and receive the mooch point from A for it, book being shipped directly to person A? Direct shipping is more ecological, the charity would make money and person B would get a BM point for a price they feel Ok paying, while person A gets a book they want. I think this would be very difficult to implement, but I am just leaving this idea in case it is interesting to somebody. Spending money shipping books to businesses which will try to resell them and reship them does not feel an efficient way of sharing books to me.
May 8, 2008 at 2:01 am
I agree with those who think this is not a great idea. I too have had to get over bookstore owners using Book Mooch, but at least these are small businesses. This sounds like one of those ideas that looks better than it really it. I hope you will look in to it more before committing to it.
May 8, 2008 at 2:27 am
Simply put:
DO NOT WANT.
It’s been harder and harder the last few months to find wishlisted books as it is, and more and more members are hit-and-running, to the point where even when, amazingly, a book on my wishlist IS available AND from someone willing to send it to my country, it doesn’t matter anyways because the person never comes back and never sends the book or responds to emails and I have to cancel it a few weeks later.
Introducing something on this scale is just going to drive away more decent Bookmoochers and attract the ones who list garbage, mooch a ton of stuff from someone who is running a 2-for-1 special, and then take off without even the courtesy of closing their account.
Maybe I’m catastrophizing, but I’m already seeing my satisfaction with my Bookmooch transactions (not the site itself, John, you’re doing a fantastic job) going downhill… Maybe we should focus on weeding out fakers and accounts that haven’t been signed in for like a year, or stop sending wishlist emails to people who can’t actually mooch the book because the person won’t send internationally, etc. before jumping into something like this… at best it will flood the system with more crap books and make everything slow down and probably crash — at worst, well… yeah. Do not want.
May 8, 2008 at 3:12 am
I’m a big fan of Betterworld Books. I have sent them over 150 boxes of books in the past two years and our library has made more than $600 in return while keeping a significant # of books from being thrown away.
May 8, 2008 at 4:33 am
Aha - BWB - the four-letter word in the world of books… or rather 3 letters. John, you should have followed some of the long discussions on ABE and other places about BWB and its tactics. It’s goal seems to be monopolistic to drive all small booksellers out of business. It massively lists millions of books, mostly at insanely low prices with free shipping, and has a special relationship worked out with a private shipping company, so cost of mailing is low on heavy parcels. No other individuals can compete. I’ve bought several hundred books from BWB at $1 each or thereabouts with free shipping. It was just like going to a booksale and having the books delivered to my door at $1 a book with free shipping. Insane business model. Some of the books were for my own 15,000 volume private book collection and other obscure books that were massively undervalued I bought to resell. One I bought from BWB at $1 with free shipping I resold for $50.
Now if BWB adds lots of inventory of interest to other BookMoochers, then fine. But if they come in like a Microsoft or Google or other monopolies and want to start taking over and cherry picking the existing BookMooch inventory, that would not be good. If, as a faux charity they can get a write-off by hiring hundreds of kids at minimum wage to cherry pick BookMooch for something of value, that would hurt everybody. My advice is don’t sleep with snakes if you don’t want to get bit.
BTW, in response to Dottie (above), we are not spending our hard-earned cash at USPS so other people can make a buck on our books… we are paying for Points at the post office so we can get the books we want ourselves in exchange for books we don’t want anymore. If I spend $2.50 to send a book to someone else who wants it and get one BM point, I’ve paid $2.50 for that point. If I choose to spend it on a book of personal interest for my own 15,000 volume library collection or for some obscure book no one else wants to mooch but I see I could sell to someone in Timbuktoo, that should be my choice, since I’ve paid for that point with hard-earned cash at the USPS. …well, I haven’t sold any books to Timbuktoo, but I did sell a book on the Congo to someone in Kinshasa, so that’s pretty close.
May 8, 2008 at 4:36 am
I’ll cancel my Bookmooch account immediately if BWB comes on board as any kind of a partner with Bookmooch.
May 8, 2008 at 5:18 am
Have to agree with William on his answer to Dottie. When I send out a book, I see ir as the cost of the book I’ll be receiving with the point I just made. Which means it’s a REAL cheap way to get birthday and Christmas gifts as my entire family are readers.
As far as BWB is concerned, no thank you. I see more negative issues that outweigh the little positive of more books for mooching.
I also have to respond to Hercules40—Excuse me, points for giving to charity?!?! If one is truly feeling charitable…..just send them the books, being “paid” in half or quarter points should have nothing to do with it.
May 8, 2008 at 8:17 am
Talk about trying to monopolize the book business! The last ten books I just looked up on ABE in the last half hour - Better World Books had the cheapest listings on 9 out of the 10, and on 2 out of those 9, BWB was offering multiple copies, including ones with free shipping.
If they followed the same tactics on BM as they do on Amazon & ABE, then they’d probably put online at least one copy of half the books already currently on BookMooch - this would mean that they’d be accumulating points getting lots of mooches other members wouldn’t be getting and keeping BM points from being spread around. I think it would be very detrimental to the whole BookMooch community.
It’s more beneficial to the community if lots of different people are being mooched from, so lots of people get points to mooch from others. If one monopoly gets thousands of points and then cherry picks everyone else, that is not good for the health of the BookMooch economy.
May 8, 2008 at 8:32 am
I find it very ironic that the people most opposed to this idea are precisely the ones who have been doing on BookMooch exactly what BWB is openly proposing to do: offering their old, dusty, unsaleable books and mooching better, saleable ones in exchange. I’ve not seen one of them state this up front in their profiles, though by now they must have made thousands of dollars off BookMooch. I don’t like the idea of BM becoming a book dumpster either, but between these hypocrites and BWB, I definitely go with BWB. They give a _considerable_ amount of their profits to charity, and what’s more important to me, they make their books available at affordable prices to people all around the world. Plus I don’t see them pulling any of the petty moves that these “small” booksellers have, like accepting only multiple mooches, not bothering to list condition notes, or causing inconsiderate delays. I’m sure they would treat BookMooch members just like they treat their customers, professionally and courteously. Anyway, if this is decided against, I think it’s only fair that all booksellers (big or small) that are here to make profits should be forbidden to use BookMooch, not just them.
May 8, 2008 at 9:12 am
So I just checked out BWB’s website. And guess what. I don’t think they are too much of a threat to hometown book sellers, at least they won’t be getting any of my business…BECAUSE all the books I just searched (my main wishlisted authors) were VERY expensive. Someone said they got books from them for $1 each??? I wasn’t seeing any of that. I have done far better purchasing from little antique stores, ebay, and small sellers on amazon.
May 8, 2008 at 10:34 am
Thank you for taking a moment to respond Mr. Helgesen, but you seem not to have addressed most key points.
As this appears to be your first visit here, I encourage you to look around and notice the full transparency which registered Bookmooch charities operate under, and which is so sadly lacking from “Better World Books” (also known as Qumpus Incorporated.). I will respond to some of your notes in much more detail then when the points were first raised, although there are many grave concerns raised about your company by those in the Bookmooch community which mirror those previously raised by the National Assoc. of College Stores among others, and which you have not yet made a clear response to.
Even if only 10% of your sales are donated, your company has surely helped work toward your company’s motto of ‘funding global literacy,’ but do you really think that every one of your 11 million donated books would simply have gone to a land fill as your web site suggest?
Why so entirely overlook the charitable organizations which have been supplanted by BWB/QUMPUS’s efforts. Charitable book drives have been a mainstay in U.S. culture for many decades before your corporation began its expansion. Why ignore the fact that millions of dollars are being diverted from organizations that aim to donate something approaching 80-90% of proceeds, rather than BWB/QUMPUS’s 10% donated? And why make such sweeping claims of saving books from land fills and recycling them when the great majority of all responsible university book drives and library sales had previous recycled excess books themselves?
Bookmooch has its own structure of charitable organization and would certainly welcome Books for Africa and each of your other partners so that books could be donated directly rather than being passed through your company en route, thus leaving only a 10% share…
—————–
Regarding Emily Thayer’s Points: We are a for-profit social venture, and we make no bones about it. We’re very clear about this on our website.
———-
Response: While the fact that BWB/QUMPUS is a for-profit company is currently mentioned (not on the main page, nor the pages where sales are made, nor through your surrogate sellers such as Amazon and dozens of others, but the information can be found for those few which might seek it out), it is not a prominent aspect of the site. Rather, one is greeted with all encompassing claims such as “All sold to fund literacy,” and “Funds global literacy.” I would challenge you to honestly claim that any new customer to your company is initially or clearly greeted with the fact that sales are going to a for-profit company donating only 10% of the price of the books sold.
More significantly, this information is not made clear in the promotion of the book drives you help to organize and so greatly profit from, but you are perhaps not aware of this as these drives appear to be operated by another division of your expanding company. BWB/QUMPUS clearly presents itself as being charitable in purpose, and not even in the fine print is the 90/10 division of expenses/profits to donations disclosed. You are perhaps not aware of the standards which charitable organizations are governed, but operating expenses in excess of 20-30% are considered high and anything over 50% is widely considered to be unethical, particularly if these percentages are not fully disclosed to all who donate their valued goods. I understand that youreslf and yoiur fellow founders are still (apparently) in your twenties and seem to have thus far had only brief acquaintance with genuine charity organizations. But many of us here have invested long years or even decades in charity work and do not take kindly to the emerging trend of for-profit corporations assuming the mantle of charitable entities.
I have witnessed BWB/QUMPUS drives at three university campuses and there is every appearance that donated book are primarily going to the benefit of Books for Africa (which often dominates the poster art) and other charitable groups, not that only a small fraction of revenue generated from sales is going to these organizations. I’ve included a link below of a representative student group promotion of the book drive based on misleading literature which conflates BMB with Books for Africa.
———-
I’m sure if you stopped by and met us, you’d see that we’re nice people, and we’re certainly not a “big business” of the ilk of Wal-Mart.
———
Response: The point here was not that you are on the scale of Wal Mart, but that corporations of every size make charitable donations, in fact, many do so at the aprox 10% level as you appear to do without primarily representing themselves as a charitable entity. This level of charitable giving is essential to the success of many national charities and foundations, but also serves as a valued promotion tool as well as a tax asset. I applaud the embrace of the ‘triple bottom line’ which your corporation and so many others have been embracing, but this does not make such entities charitable as a primary goal as your BWB/QUMPUS promotion materials so strongly suggest.
———-
We are very proud to be part of the Mishawaka community and try to engage any way we can. We encourage our employees to volunteer, and have partnerships including with the Center for the Homeless and the Robinson Community Learning Center. We have also created over 100 jobs in the community, ranging from picking orders to writing software.
——–
Response: Fair compensation is one thing, executive salaries of over $100,000 are another. Such information should be part of your public presentation (and comments made here) as it so belies your projected image as a small company primarily soliciting donations for charitable purposes.
———-
Regarding our participation: As I mentioned before, our participation in BookMooch only makes sense to the degree that we add value to the community. If some members want books that there is not enough demand for on our sales channels, and there are other books we can receive in return that our customers do want, that seems to be a win-win to me. As the system is very cleverly designed, we’ll only be able to receive books to the extent that we provide books that members want. I’m not sure yet whether our inventory will be a good match, but I suspect that it will. Also, the program for people to send books in will not be for everyone. We’ll have to see if it is useful, and adjust it if it is not. I can’t see how people could object to it, as it is an optional program and certainly it doesn’t hurt if it exists.
—–
Response: So your plan is to transfer books which are not sellable to Bookmooch. If a book is unable to find a home through your extensive sales network, it might well come to the same fate here.
This is certainly allowed here, and there are many independent book sellers which are a part of the BM community. Some books whihc are not sellable may well find a home here, although partcipating in international trading is encouraged.
But, okay, if you are unsure if it would be a good match why not start small with a few hundred books and see how that goes? I have seen no objections to this as long as you make no misleading claims of primarily working towards charitable ends.
Still the larger question is: Why do you think that Bookmooch needs BWB/QUMPUS as a middle man to give books to charitable groups? Why should we not continue to act as middle men as we have been with our own charitable groups?
It seems far more logical and direct for us to donate directly to Books for Africa and related programs rather than to a companty which absorbs 90% of the revenue from books donated….
——-
Regarding Mark William’s post: Mark, you rightly mention that Books For Africa is a top-notch publicly accountable charity. The fact that our programs are both the largest source of funding and University-level books for Books For Africa ought to tell you something.
——
Response: Yes, I have noticed that BWB/QUMPUS tends to conflate your company with this well known and well respected charity. In fact, some of your promotional material for university book drives appears to mainly suggest books are going directly to this particular charity, rather than just a fraction of the proceeds from sales, and books which do not sell through your web site. It appears that you have donated approximately 5-7% of the total books they have received (less than a million of their 15 million total).
I cannot speak to your relationship with this charity (but the most recent public data suggest $67K donated, and books of undisclosed value since 2003), but are you quite sure that your company is fully transparent with the 1000+ local book drives and sales with which you have been involved? This would include a fully reckoning of the total sales you derive from the books you attain from these programs. As your publicly disclosed revenues were $16+ million for 2007 alone, these are significant figures. I have worked with university campuses where no valuation of the books which were accumulated was delivered, but rather the fractional donations made, or commisions if you would rather phrase it that way, essential your cost of goods, proudly touted as a charitable donation in your average $1 million per year charitable giving tally which is so often repeated (in the cumulative 5.6 million dollar figure five year figure), and which is completely decontextualised from the 90/10 split and yearly revenues in the many millions (again, $16+ million in 2007 alone).
——————-
We are fully transparent with our non-profit partners, and you can feel free to independently verify this and contact them. I highly encourage anyone who wants to front the postage or lives in the Minneapolis area to donate books direct to Books For Africa. I serve on the board of the organization and it has been an exceptional privilege.
You do have a few facts mixed up - we sell almost all of our books on consignment for non-profits and libraries, and we pay a percentage of gross, not net. The commission varies, since we cover all costs associated with the book collections. Since we are a nationwide program, there are many costs associated with book collection and inbound shipping that are always going to be higher than a local operation. The strength of our program is really the scale - most local booksellers cannot take on 20,000 books at once and sell them effectively. They would typically have to “cherry pick” the best books and recycle the rest. Because of our scale, we are able to handle these kind of volumes, and that is a reason a lot of libraries have chosen to work with us.
—–
Response: Okay, the press reports may have mistaken a very low percentage of gross sale with a very low percentage of net sales, but you are dodging the point here: exactly what is your overall rate of charitable donations? Do you dispute the 10% figure from the link below?
To merely state that the commission varies is to say nothing at all. This BM community deserves a better response than this.
If your revenue was $16 million+ for last year alone and you appear to have averaged aprox $1 million in donations each of the last five years, are we not in the 10% donated ball park (assuming you made quite a bit less than this in your earlier years)?
And yes, libraries are indeed chronically short on volunteer staff and so are likely to take whatever short cuts are needed to liquidate large numbers of books in one blow, but rather than justifying the paltry 10% return on books purchased from them, it suggests the need to more fairly compensate them.
————–
Finally, I can assure you that our profits are not in the 10’s of millions. As I’ve mentioned in a blog comment on another site (where they wanted to see the cars and houses of the founders), I rent and don’t own a car. We have relatively small margins after the amount we share with our literacy partners, and reinvest a great deal in our people, our software, and spreading the word about Better World Books.
———-
Response: No claims were made of profits, just total revenue as you do not disclose your profits, is that not correct?
I understand six figure salaries do not go as far as they once did, but still, don’t you think this information should be publicly disclosed?
This statement deerves to be signled out: “We have relatively small margins after the amount we share with our literacy partners” any rational person would read this to mean you give the majority of your revenues to charitable groups and not the 10% which appears to be closer to the truth.
Agreed, if a charitable organizations were to develop such a sales network which is so extensive and which you are rightly proud of, then this could be a great asset to libraries and university book drives. But if this were to be the case, far, far more than 10% of revenues would be returned back to the sources from which these books were donated, don’t you think? There are, in fact, much smaller truly charitable companies that aim to do just this, and with which your are directly competing with.
And yes, companies your age would tend to heavily invest in their operations and continued growth (and ever rising corporate valuation), but as your company has not made your net profits publicly available would you care to give us an estimate? Aside from your confusion over what was initialed posted, all that I have mentioned is your gross revenue of $16 million+ as has been publicly reported (link below).
———
So, in short:
As a spokesman for BWB/QUMPUS, you seem to suggest that your company is making very little profit, yet how do you explain $16 million+ in revenue last year alone with approximately only 10% donated to charity, not the majority as your site so strongly seems to indicate? These numbers are glaring and inescapable. Rather than just vaguely stating that the ‘commsions vary’ why not give us a ball park figure if it is higher than the 10% as published? And if it is do you then dispute your own publicly listed donations and generated revenue?
Claims are made that each of your 11 millions books is somehow being saved from a land fill, yet nearly all responsible university and library sales recycle unwanted books as you do.
Why not disclose the percentage of the books BWB/QUMPUS gathered which are recycled? (which appears to the be the majority of your 11 million unless you are selling more than 1 million books a year, or making undisclosed donations). The fact that so many books are simply recycled ought to be clearly spelled out at the point of donation. And the statements ignoring the displacement of previously existing charities needs to be modified so that the suggestion that the books are being 100% saved from simple disposal is not being made.
—-
References:
Mentions NPR report of 100,000+ saleries for executives, and some of 160+ employees
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/bookpatrol/archives/136400.asp?from=blog_last3
only 10% of profits donated
http://digital-lifestyles.info/2008/04/08/eco-amazoncom-rival-betterworld-books-gets-funding/
(at least) $16 millon in revenue last year alone
http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/07/better-world-books-draws-up-45m-for-textbook-rescue-service/
http://www.sbsun.com/business/ci_8860903
National Assoc of College stores questions % of proft and misleading promotional materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_World_Books
Student press based on misleading conflation (from BWB) with Books For Africa:
http://media.www.redandblack.com/media/storage/paper871/news/2008/04/29/Opinions/Donate.Your.Books.Save.A.Life-3354071.shtml
Representative frat/seroirty promotion of BWB as being charitabkle in nature:
http://www.ptk.org/chapters/bwb/
May 8, 2008 at 10:54 am
Just a new note, I saw the update presenting Helgelsen reply, and I am even more negative now about having betterworldbooks be a player in the conditions you stated.
Part of the fun of this system is that being book to book, one point ( or 2/3) all, introducing a large, very large for-profit organization into the system, do you really think it will be good for the “economics” of bookmooch? Something I really love about bookmooch is that it´s a different system, I think with the bookmooch there is potential to have a new system of book circulation reader-to-reader which seems totally fascinating to me. Bringing large businesses ( nevermind if they give 10% of profits, gross or net) to any charities, seems very worrying to me.
May 8, 2008 at 10:55 am
Mark & others — just to make sure you have not misunderstood :
I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT BWB BE A BOOKMOOCH REGISTERED CHARITY
In fact, I’m not suggesting we treat BWB in any special way whatsoever.
Xavier is suggesting that BWB join BookMooch as a regular member, giving and mooching just as anyone else, subject to all the same rules as everyone else. And, if some people want to “dump books” on BWB, they’re willing to accept them.
Heck, I think it’d be great if lots of BookMooch members offered to “receive dozens of boxes of unwanted books, and pay you for that in BookMooch points”. BWB doesn’t have exclusivity on that, anyone is welcome to do that today.
While BM is a free service, meaning you don’t pay me to use it, in no way am I or is BookMooch anti-commercial.
I’ve worked at, and been on the board of a lot of charities (and still am) and so far I think that socially minded companies can do a lot of good and still make a profit, and I don’t begrudge them their profit.
Most of the charities I’ve helped, especially the older ones, are all about themselves, and internal fighting, and wining architectural awards for their new headquarters. That’s why the BM registered charities that we work with tend to be smaller, very goal oriented, and are often not government registered.
May 8, 2008 at 11:15 am
Thanks for the clarification John, I can see how some may think that is a point of contention.
But I don’t think most of those responding misread that they would be a Bookmooch charity, just that BWBs well established pattern of misrepresentation is quite disturbing. And the prospect of a partnership with this particular company and one million books listed is troubling.
I don’t think many have objected to their being able to operate under the same rules which we all do here.
And while my experiences have been quite positive with charities, I do also quite agree that honest for-profit socially orientated companies do much good work, more than charities do in some arenas, but full public disclosure is an essential aspect of this.
Particularly when such misleading claims are being made to bring in their donations.
May 8, 2008 at 12:35 pm
It doesn’t matter to me if they are for profit or not. We would then have more books to choose from. They would still be “free” to us as are the rest of the books on bookmooch. If people want to sell the books that they mooch from me, fine. They are books that I no longer use or have the shelf space for. This frees up shelf space for the books that I do use and I get points to order them. Either way, it keeps books available and frees up landfill space.
As far as giving them books that I no longer have space for, if it comes to that, I would probably do it because I know for a fact that my local library throws books away.
Recently I’ve had several new moochers mooch books that I can’t believe that anyone would want. So, you just never know. In addition, when I read books, they quote other books that are frequently out of print and I find those on bookmooch.
Availability is the name of the game here.
May 8, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I say, let them join like a regular member. If you don’t want to dump books on them, that is your option. If you don’t want to do business with them, fine. But some of us wouldn’t mind at all.
May 8, 2008 at 12:58 pm
“Heck, I think it’d be great if lots of BookMooch members offered to “receive dozens of boxes of unwanted books, and pay you for that in BookMooch points”. BWB doesn’t have exclusivity on that, anyone is welcome to do that today.”
To be completely honest not sure I see any advantage in the scheme proposed for bookmoocher users. .1 for books which have not been mooched in the last year is precisely what one gets from just listing books in inventory. People who want books out and are willing to pay shipping costs for .1 a book can offer a deal where they return the points mooched for a certain lot of books, can already do get precisely the same points by just listing books on Bookmooch and offering the point-back deal. Maybe you can implement that in another way? Plus who knows there might be hidden treasures there other bookmoochers would love to see. I am sure that .1 BM point for each book shipped in a box, there will likely be takers willing to offer it as well. or if you got enough storage, just list them and wait a year, some might very well get mooched for enough points to make it worthwhile if it cames to sending unwanted ones to recycling at least it can be nearby recycling and will save carbon footprint from mailing big boxes to BWB.
BWB offering 1 point for recently mooched books is good and might save money in shipping for those shipping the boxes, but BWB is counting in recouping money with those by selling those and reshipping. Again reshipping and a lot of shipping of big book boxes just does not seem carbon footprint friendly to me, but nevermind that, the problem is that is it likely we bookmoochers would much rather see that type of books listed on bookmooch for us to able to mooch.
I don´t really see what is so special or nice about this offer, or how it might be advantageous for bookmooch and its users. You are already doing something very nice and special and helping to enable that rare books find the people that want them by offering .1 point for each book in inventory no matter what.
May 8, 2008 at 3:59 pm
“Heck, I think it’d be great if lots of BookMooch members offered to “receive dozens of boxes of unwanted books, and pay you for that in BookMooch points”. BWB doesn’t have exclusivity on that, anyone is welcome to do that today.”
I think the problem with this suggestion is that it replicates existing charities that accept boxes of books without requiring that they be shipped to an intermediate location. GoodWill has thousands, possibly tens of thousands of donation-reception points in the US. The Salvation Army is another well-established charity that accepts books in every large city. In my region we even have a third charity, Saint Vincent’s, that is happy to see incoming books. If one approaches this from an environmental standpoint, it makes more sense to locally process donations of heavy things, such as boxes of books. To go one better, most of these large, existing charities will send a truck to your door and provide free pickup with just a phone call. The alternative suggested just does not make sense financially for the giver, or in terms of environmental impact.
To reply to Xavier: you seem to have missed my points. What IS your idea of a fair wage? Minimum wage may be legal, but it is not fair, nor a living wage. Why *aren’t* you a nonprofit?
To John Buckman: you are missing the obvious application that BWB will be scanning the BM database 24 hours a day. BWB states that they employ computer programmers. A simple scanning program will destroy your site. It is the equivalent of allowing a 300-pound goon into the cozy trading corner (which was your original vision), who scoops up all the “good” books as soon as they are dropped onto the trading table.
BookMooch could be altered with the commonly used validation mechanism of typing in a visually distorted code, which only a human being can decipher. This would at least ensure that a real human being is mooching the books, and not an automated computer program. If that is implemented, then I’d have to agree with Jon Maloney, who pointed out that the 2:1 trading ratio ensures that people provide wanted books in exchange for whatever they take from the site.
Thank you for everyone’s comments.
Sincerely,
Emily Thayer
dba Thayer Books
May 8, 2008 at 4:46 pm
To John Buckman: you are missing the obvious application that BWB will be scanning the BM database 24 hours a day. BWB states that they employ computer programmers. A simple scanning program will destroy your site. It is the equivalent of allowing a 300-pound goon into the cozy trading corner (which was your original vision), who scoops up all the “good” books as soon as they are dropped onto the trading table.
You haven’t seen the BookMooch web logs — this is *already happening* and hmmm.. nobody’s noticed. I’ve spotted at least 4 “entities” doing automated checking of books in the BookMooch system. I’ve checked their accounts, and they all have ratios around 1:1 and very positive feedback. It doesn’t take much research to find accounts that have sent and received more than 1000 books, and that’s pretty hard to explain as personal consumption. But… remind me why this is a problem? They send books out that people want, and get lots of positive feedback…
The automated checking of the BM inventory was going to happen, no matter what.There are two ways to deal with it:
1) fight it as “hacking” and try to block it
2) make the rules of BM work in a way that handles this gracefully.
I went with #2, because in my experience #1 doesn’t work.
The biggest change I made was to lower the ratio from 5:1 to 2:1, so that accounts that list tons of books couldn’t use their points unless they also gave away lots of books. That’s worked well.
Also, unhappy mooches (ie, not giving condition notes on damaged books) leads to complaints, which the abuse dept handles, and if you get too many of them, your account is closed, and you lose all your points, which is a *huge* motivator to play good.
So, to recap, this two pronged approach (good rules & human oversight of complaints) seems to work well, and when/if it has problems, I’ll continue to revisit the rules and our processes.
regarding the people who don’t like my comment:
“Heck, I think it’d be great if lots of BookMooch members offered to “receive dozens of boxes of unwanted books, and pay you for that in BookMooch points”. BWB doesn’t have exclusivity on that, anyone is welcome to do that today.”
I’m not sure they realized that I’ve had a least a dozen conversations with large repositories of books, who want to give bookmooch a warehouse full of books for free. However, I have no way of accepting those books at this point, but I’d like to find a way in which those books could get back into reader’s hands.
This is not a case of “should I list the books on bookmooch myself, or send them to someone else” — no, this is a case where “I have a warehouse of books, and no money to pay people to type them all into bookmooch and postal mail them to people” — so the books languish in a farmhouse somewhere.
-john
May 8, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Well, I have to toss my hat in the ring with the folks opposed to this move. John, I haven’t read anything in the previous posts that suggests anyone is anti for-profit companies trying to be socially responsible. I give my business to many of them myself. I’m reading that some people are arguing that their overall contribution is not so great, and perhaps may be having the effect of reducing funds/books going to the charities they support. I’m not going to pick a side on that one, but that’s the concern. The second, more important, concern that I’m seeing is whether allowing BWB and other companies like them participate in bookmooch benefits the community or not.
On this point, I do have an opinion. I think what makes bookmooch so great is that it is primarily individuals sharing a love of books and trading them. Sure, there may be some small companies out there reselling the books and scanning the inventory. There may be some individuals reselling on eBay. The question, though, is one of scale. It’s one thing to know that there are a few entities that are doing this and another to openly sanction it. I think once that happens, it is going to become a forum for the “big guys” to trade books, sidelining us regular individuals who are trading for fun. By “big guys,” I mean technologically saavy people or companies who may be paying people to look 24X7 for saleable books (which of course, would include all highly wishlisted books). That’s why I don’t even think they should be permitted to be a member.
Here’s an example: I sent out a copy of Water for Elephants today. It was on 192 wishlists, and now one lucky woman in Tennessee is going to get it in a few days. I know this woman is an individual just planning to read the book (and hopefully relist it). Now she’ll take that book off her wishlist, increasing the chances for the others on the list to get it the next time. But, in a situation where you have a BWB out there, they’ll want not just one but ALL copies of Water for Elephants that come up because they know it will sell. I don’t see how that’s going to make it easier for members to get the books they want - especially the highly wishlisted ones. Since I now only mooch books that are on my wishlist, it sure doesn’t seem like a great benefit to have a company out there skimming the good stuff. I think this would be particularly devastating for international moochers, many of whom already have to take the time to find an angel in time to get a book they really want before it gets mooched by someone in country.
Another issue: If I want to support BWB and their business model, I’ll just go and buy books from them or send books to them directly. However, I don’t want to do that through Bookmooch. If they do join, and I get mooch requests from them, I’ll reject them. Then maybe I start to build up an inordinately high number of rejects in my profile, particularly if BWB is just the beginning and other companies like them start to join.
Ultimately, of course, it is your decision on how to proceed. You created this great and wonderful site, and I thank you for giving us the opportunity to comment. I think a lot of this discussion is a philisophical one about what bookmooch becomes in the future, and not about whether there are for-profit companies out there who do good work and good deeds - of which there are many.
Thanks again for considering all of our opinions.
May 8, 2008 at 7:48 pm
As a BookMooch charity and a non-profit partner of Better World Books, the Prison Book Program has a unique perspective on this issue.
Better World Books has been selling books we cannot use since 2004 and we have found them to be a great partner. To date they have raised over $25,000 for us which accounts for over 33% of our budget and has funded shipments to more than 8000 prisoners. We get 30% of the revenues for the books they sell on our behalf. Yes, that is relatively small, but when you consider that they pay for everything from the shipping of our books to their warehouse to the handling of the purchases, it is more than fair. We have tried selling books on our own through Amazon, through local booksellers and by running our own book sales. All proved to be far too much effort for way too little gain. BWB brings economy of scale to non-profit book selling in the same way Amazon brings it to book-selling in general. Many may not consider that a good thing, but we most certainly do.
The person that manages our relationship with BWB works in the publishing industry. She has met the CEO and founders and visited their facility in South Bend, Indiana. She found them to be genuinely dedicated to funding literacy efforts and was quite impressed with their operation. They are also a recent recipient of Fast Company Magazine’s social entrepreneur award. I worked for a non-profit that received this award several years in a row. I can say that Fast Company does not award this honor lightly. The recipients are changing the world in powerful ways and are doing it honestly and efficiently.
BookMooch has also been a boon to us in the ~6 months we have been an official charity. We have mooched over 350 books and nearly all of these are so in-demand that they are sent to a prisoner within a week of receiving them. Because of BookMooch we have been able to dramatically improve the quality of reading material we send out. We have mooched dictionaries (which prisoners use to teach themselves to read), almanacs, self-help and religious materials of all kinds, business books and many more. When an inmate learns to read or start a business or gets his GED or improves his mental state, he is far more likely to have a successful life on the outside – and because of legions of generous BookMoochers we are able to provide many more of these hard-to-find titles than we have in the past. Unfortunately, we (and the other prison book charities) regularly clean out BM’s inventory of these books. Having more available would be fantastic!
BWB and BookMooch joining forces would make more of these titles available to everyone. We pre-screen the books we send to BWB to weed out the un-saleable ones – so I am very familiar with the books they deem un-saleable and could become available on BookMooch. While some are the same MMPs that likely are sitting in everyone’s inventories for months, a great number of them are non-fiction titles that would go in minutes on BookMooch.
BWB has increased the quantity of books we send out. BookMooch has improved the quality. Working together, they may be able to do more of both. It sounds like there are many details to be thought out and considered before going forward with this plan, but I do hope that two of our favorite partners will find a way to work together. They would make a powerful team that would benefit the entire community.
Marlene Cook
Prison Book Program
http://www.prisonbookprogram.org
Quincy, MA
May 8, 2008 at 9:23 pm
John, after reading all the comments about the BWB idea, I can appreciate how convoluted and time consuming a democracy in action is.
And ain’t that wonderful…
It’s a feeling of true community which makes Bookmooch so special.
Count me as one of those folks who don’t want the community feeling to be adulterated by the intrusion of for-profit entities. I like knowing that I have sent a book to someone who will hopefully enjoy it as much as I did, someone who, like me, may not have a large budget for books.
And who will probably, like me, re-list the book for others to share.
With Bookmooch, you have created a community of like minded folks happy to share with each other, on a level playing field, ( well, for the most part anyhow).
With respect to and for BWB, I prefer not to change the status quo of Bookmooch.
May 8, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Wow, this has been an interesting read. I’m not opposed to BWB being regular members…as has been stated, if corporations are banned all that will do is have companies get their employees to man ostensibly individual accounts for company benefit. Transparency for all! I am not surprised to hear the news that someone or -ones have programmed bots to scan bookmooch and/or pull wishlisted books automagically. That is inevitable, and I agree with John, not even necessarily undesirable. The trick is making sure that such auto-bots don’t side check everyone else out of the running for desirable books.
I vastly prefer BookMooch to its competitor PBS, but their CD swap site seems to have some advantages over other CD sites…specifically in having a native bot-retriever ap for desired items based on a waiting list. It seems to me that integrating auto-mooch options and/or a reservation system is the only way to let individual moochers like me ‘compete’ with the big boys with $$ to pay programmers or even just low-wage employees to refresh the wishlist page every minute or two and scan it for newly listed books, at least in the longer run.
I know that would entail a headache or two for John, if not several dozen. I think some kind of bot-competition, with the entries being offered as freeware or shareware (can we pay in mooch points?? ;^) to BM members might yield some interesting results as an intermediate step.
I await any thoughts with interest.
May 8, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Thank you for contributing Marlene. It is very good to hear of your positive experience, and that your group is earning three times the average 10% ‘donation’ which seems to be the overall BWB average, while not displacing existing charitable entities as they have done in other cases.
I hope you will consider accepting box donation as well, so the BM community can more directly benefit your cause, without taking up quite so much of your limited time to seek out books. I have also proposed a ‘charity buddy system’ where you can tell a few mooching partners what kind of books you are in need of and these can then be mooched on your behalf.
As a large company (in relative terms) the differing divisions of BWB surely function differently. My experiences over the last three years has been with the university books drives, which seem to account for the lion share of donated books as they are now being held many hundreds of times per year all across the U.S.
And it is these book drives which are fraught with deceptive promotion, conflation of Books for Africa and BWB, and seem to have a much, lower fractional share of revenues contributed: aprox 10% of gross sales.
———————
As with others, I tend to think that search bots are problematic and think that rather than trying to defeat such things individually, that if it were to become BM policy that this is not allowable, and this is communicated clearly to the four accounts John has detected and to future new accounts, then the threat of account suspension should eliminate the use of these bots in whatever manifestation that is attempted.
We all value the level playing field and the use of any mechanised tools which are not available to all seems to very much go against this notion.
May 9, 2008 at 1:18 am
~hi all.
a fabulous give and take.
i do love our bookmooch community.
regarding what john of prison book world said, that’s a fine endorsement, eh?
i appreciate the concerns.
but i fancy the idea the buckman’s have proposed.
can people support a trial period of time? say a 6-month experiment with this?
thanks for bringing this to us, jb.
~jg florida
May 9, 2008 at 3:16 am
The intentions behind the proposed BM-BWB partnership may be good, but IMHO it should be buried in the the bad-ideas graveyard.
Social entrepreneurship has its virtues, but it is not charity. Correspondingly, a socially aware for-profit company should neither represent itself as a charity — nor should it represent itself intentionally in a way that others may perceive it as a charity. In terms of this specifically proposed partnership: It just doesn’t make sense. There is no good reason given why this particular for-profit company has been singled out for its partnership with BookMooch. Or, if it is just going to have a regular account, there is similarly no reason for this large book retailer to be singled out in the blog for the community’s support.
On the surface, both BWB and BM are for-profit enterprises that involve the exchange of books. But while BWB could certainly use BM as a source of more books to sell for profit, BM does not need BWB as a a middleman for charity. That’s because BM already has its own networks of charities. It would make more sense to focus on giving books (single books and/or en masse) to genuine charities already affiliated with BM. If you want to support, say, Prison Book Program, you can give to them directly. If BWB wants to participate, it can do so the same as any individual: Without “charity” status, without misrepresenting itself as a charitable organization, and by receiving points by sending books that other users want. But it makes no sense to support BWB in order to support the Prison Book Program or Books for Africa, when one can just support charities directly through BookMooch. And it makes no sense to advertise for BWB to accept your boxes of books in order to sell them for profit. I’m sure there are many users that are not even big multi-million-dollar companies that would take boxes of books off others’ hands to sell them to help pay their monthly bills. And I’m sure there are plenty of users who would take boxes of books and would list them on BookMooch to redistribute for free to other users.
Going forward, I would hope that the same energy and fervor now being used to push BWB would be used to directly court Books for Africa as a BM-affiliated charity. And, of course, it would be great to see a mechanism for giving boxes of books to BM-affiliated charities. Until that mechanism is in place, though, if you have a box of books (or boxes) that you want to give away to an actual nonprofit entity, there are a plethora of them that accept books to help people all around the world. The following is a sampling:
Books for Africa:
“A simple name for a simple organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship and distribute books to children in Africa. That’s all we do. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa.”
http://www.booksforafrica.org/index.html
Darien Book Aid:
“Darien Book Aid is a non-profit, all volunteer organization that builds a foundation of peace, understanding, and friendship by distributing free books. Book Aid sends books in response to specific requests from Peace Corps volunteers, libraries and schools all over the world.”
http://dba.darien.org/
Sudan-American Foundation for Education:
“Since 1985, we have delivered over 275,000 books to 60+ Sudanese libraries, colleges, universities and nongovernmental organizations.”
http://www.sudan-safe.org/donations.htm
Books for Soldiers:
“Regardless of why the military is deployed, the men and women of our armed services are there for us. They deserve our support and if we can make their deployment easier, then all the better.”
http://www.booksforsoldiers.com/
Bridge to Asia:
“Bridge to Asia is a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that supports the modernization of higher education in developing countries in Asia, principally China. In our main effort, we provide books, journals, monographs, databases and other educational materials that are essential for teaching and research but too costly for most schools or scholars to afford.”
http://www.bridge.org/
Brother’s Brother Foundation:
“Every donation makes a difference. A pair of crutches allows a man to walk in Nicaragua while a story book reaches eager students in Ghana.”
http://www.brothersbrother.org/bookpolicy.htm
If you give your books to the above charities, or other charities outside of BookMooch, you won’t get points (or the fractional points per book, as proposed), but you will get a tax write-off — and the satisfaction of knowing that your donations will not be going to a for-profit company that takes its cut before passing on a small portion to charities, but rather you’ll be giving directly to the charities and people themselves that actually need the help.
May 9, 2008 at 5:10 am
Kudos to all for the marvelous diplomacy with which this controversial discussion is taking place.
It is an interesting coincidence that Julie Hedlund commented on the very aspect of this topic that has been on my mind. It has been on my mind because of the very positive experience I had with the last book mooched from me- mooched by, what-do-you-know, Julie Hedlund. You see, I finished reading a book the other night and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was considering keeping it, but I had noted on BookMooch that a few people had wishlisted the books in this particular series, and there had been very few of them come available. So I decided to pass it on. The next morning after I listed it, Julie had requested it. (HI JULIE!) And through our BM email correspondences, I came to find out that she was very excited to mooch the book because her daughter is the 3rd generation in her family enjoying this particular series. I was so happy to be able to send it to her, and now I can picture her reading the charming story to her daughter. It made me feel really good.
I love the idea of BookMooch members being individuals in homes everywhere enjoying and sharing books. In the first week after joining, I told the friend that referred me to BM that one thing I loved about it was that it was built on good principles, such as unselfishness and sharing. It made me want to share and I experienced the joy of giving from my first book sent out on. (By the way, the first person who mooched from me was so sweet. With her mooch she welcomed me and told me that those on BM were pretty friendly people and she invited me to ask any questions if I needed help.) There were a couple comments above about the cost of sending books being the ‘payment’ for the book you actually want to get with the point received. And yes….that is true, it is one way of looking at it. But I don’t usually look at it that way. When I send a book out, I think of it as sending a gift. I am glad to make someone else excited to receive a book they have long wanted. In that way, BookMooch promotes the joy of giving. When I receive a book, I think of it as a free book, not one I have already payed for by sending a book in the past. And when I look at it this way it makes mooching all the better! (A free book- yay!)
My point of all this is: If I were to send a book to BWB after they mooched it from me, am I going to be happy to send it? It will be nothing more than a business transaction. No “thanks so much for this BEAUTIFUL book!” or “Wow, I am so excited to get this!” The only reason I’ll be happy to send it is because I got a BM point out of it, and instead of being an unselfish experience it will be a selfish one.
In my experience, exchanging books on BookMooch has the feel of a small town business. I live in a very small town, where a lot of the older people know my grandpa and great aunts and uncles. This week I walked into a local hardware store to pick up some gardening supplies. (Actually, I’ve gotten into the habit of using the convenience of bigger stores for a lot of my shopping needs, but this week I decided to support my local hardware store even if it meant spending a little more money. Why did I do this? Because comments of other bookmoochers got me thinking.) At the hardware, I was greeted by a familiar face and three different workers helped me find what I was looking for, one of whom graduated with my dad. I got free popcorn from their machine and got a free homemade cookie off the counter. (Another friendly customer had apparently brought cookies in that day.) Everyone was so friendly, just like on BookMooch. It is the individuals on BookMooch, not any larger scale booksellers, that make BM so much fun. Transactions with a larger businesses, forgeting whether the business operates for a noble cause or not, just aren’t as friendly. A BM transaction with BWB would be more like walking into WalMart, finding my gardening supplies, and walking on out without even having to say a hello. (I am not suggesting BWB is as big a business as WalMart, as that seemed to be a touchy point earlier…
So those are my thoughts with higher values in mind, but if I look at it from a more selfish standpoint, the proposal sounds good. There was a concern that the “leftovers” BWB doesn’t want wouldn’t be wanted here either. But I doubt that. A lot of the books I’ve sent out were ones that I was surprised someone wanted; many had not been wishlisted. And my personal tastes in literature are not what is extremely popular. Most of the books on my wishlist are wishlisted by no one else or very few other moochers. And when I scan through the Top 500 wishlisted books, I see very little I am even remotely interested in. But I know the books I want are out there, and no doubt BWB has some of them. If they posted them, would I mooch them? Probably, because I really do want them….although I am hesitant to say so and encourage them to join after what I have just written.
What I see as an even bigger problem is: If so many are very strongly opposed to this idea, but BWB still joined, and if many close their BM accounts because of it….that would be TERRIBLE. That is a good enough reason in itself against the proposal.
But now that BWB is interested in BM, as Cheryl just mentioned, what is to prevent them from joining as if just an individual? I hope they would be above that. Ay, ay, ay. The challenges of this discussion are getting to me….
May 9, 2008 at 5:16 am
Hey! I used a parenthesis for punctuation and it turned into an emoticon! I wasn’t winking at anyone.
Sorry that last entry was sooo long, everyone…
May 9, 2008 at 8:03 am
“What I see as an even bigger problem is: If so many are very strongly opposed to this idea, but BWB still joined, and if many close their BM accounts because of it….that would be TERRIBLE. That is a good enough reason in itself against the proposal.”
Yes, well sadly I have to say that I’ll be one of the fi