elbales

Paperback Swap is one of those cool new economy things where an old-fashioned idea, that of swapping, gets a modern update. You post books you'd be willing to mail to people; in return, you get credits and can request books for other people to mail to you. All you pay for is the postage. I've posted eleven books this evening; one's already set to be mailed as soon as I can get to the post office, and four others have been requested and are just waiting for confirmation that the requesters have enough credits for the books. I know it does happen that people sometimes get burned, but the members are mostly pretty cool.

Reminds me a little of Bruce Sterling's short story "Maneki Neko" from his collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future. Only in that case, the protagonist's PDA is arranging his contributions to a computer-mediated gift economy, and others' PDAs are doing the same thing.

ETA: Almost forgot: If you decide to sign up, I'd be obliged if you'd give them my name as a referrer, as I get credits whenever someone signs up because I referred them. You can give them my e-mail address; if you need it, e-mail or comment and I'll send it to you. (Scraping = DNW.)