I'm swapping books on Swaptree dot com, hoping to solve several problems by doing this. So far... well, we'll have to see.

A radio book reviewer such as I receives a significant number of free books in the mail, and often I don't know exactly what to do with them. I no longer have much interest in teenage coming of age stories or tales of sauciers and their apprentices.

Every time I go into a bookstore I spot at least 25 books I want to own. I rarely leave without at least one or two in my clutches.

These books become friends. Not only do they make the walls look educated, books entertain, open emotional windows, answer questions and serve as reference tools. Some even get read more than once. Eventually however, a few no longer are interesting enough to justify space on home bookshelves.

It is these books, once loved, now redundant or duplicate or out of date, that Swaptree offers to help move along to another reader.

And Swaptree is free, so I tried it. So far it seems to work, but I'm going to be spending a lot of time packing and shipping books all over the place if I really get going with this. Both Swaptree and a competing swap site, bookins.com, offer pre-paid shipping labels you can print out and slap on your package, for a modest service fee plus the cost of postage.

After registering on Swaptree you type in the ISBN or UPC codes on the back of your books, or CDs or games. These will be the ones you "have" so others can "want" them. The cover of your book appears onscreen as confirmation. You rate the book's condition and note characteristics such as chips-and-tears or author signature on the title page.

For this service no money changes hands, but you will pay to ship books to other readers.

Here at home I walked around and picked out a nice stack o'books, all worthy, but no longer needed. Books I won't miss terribly if another reader claims one.

As fast as I could click, the sophisticated, algorithm-rich software at Swaptree informed me that three of my ten worthy books are in great demand by other swappers.

I've got them stacked and ready to mail as soon as I decide what I want: The three most desirable books in my possession are The Drunkard's Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, I'm Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir by Jennifer Finney Boylan, and The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst, which is a hard one to let go.

The Drunkard's Walk is in big demand. I can choose from a whopping 6,936 "items" including books, CDs, DVDs, even a couple of games.

In trade for The Foreign Correspondent I'm entitled to choose one of 339 "items" including books by Anita Shreve, Clive Cussler, Mary Higgins Clark, Jackie Collins, Sandra Brown, the Little Golden Books staff (what are THEY doing here?), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dan Brown, Frank McCourt, Richard Russo, Tim Lahaye, Stephen King, James Patterson, and that's only the most famous authors on the first page of listings.

I could also trade The Foreign Correspondent for one of 56 CDs, three DVDs and either of two games: NBA 2K ("Feel the intensity of the last two minutes as you take control and try to bury your opponent with a clutch three - pointer") or Madden NFL 2005. Who WOULDN'T trade a spy novel set during World War II for a three year-old football simulation game, I ask you?

It's an amazing spread of choices, all from real people, at least as real as I am, and it doesn't cost anything but postage, and I am going to swap. Just as soon as I can figure out what I want to swap for.

Out of ten current books in like-new condition, Swaptree found matches for three. That probably indicates that for about a third of my book collection there will be readers willing to trade. It's not a bad deal, not a bad deal at all.

I'll let you know how these trades work out.

Aired Sunday November 2, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday November 5, 2008 at 1:00 pm

NOTES:

Visit www.swaptree.com and find out for yourself if it might work for you.

There are some drawbacks to this swap site. When they say you can swap your book for 5,343 books or 1,516 CDs they definitely mean it. But if you are looking for a particular type of CD (in my case, classical music) you have to manually sift through many pages of listings to find something. And it's going to take a LOT of time to even glance at 5,343 book jackets, at approximately 30 to a page! Oh well. I'm retired.

Swaptree also will print out address labels for you, and let you purchase postage to apply to the packages you are sending.

There are several other places on the web that offer similar trading opportunities. Here is a short list. I cannot vouch for any of these, having not yet tried them out:

www.paperbackswap.com (Not just paperbacks, they say)

www.bookins.com (Lots of positive testimonials from members)

www.titletrader.com (Another free service; fairly plain and ugly interface)

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