Last month Brad helped me discover a new website for avid readers. If you like to read but hating spending a lot of money on books, you might appreciate this. If you don’t like to read but enjoy watching movies (and again don’t like spending a lot on DVDs), you might also appreicate this. If you don’t read and don’t care much for movies, then feel free to, I don’t know, check your myspace or something.

It’s called PaperBackSwap, and it’s basically a way to get free very cheap books. Here’s what you do:

1. Sign up for an account.

2. Go rummage through your bookshelves and closets and such and dig up any books you’re willing to part with.

3. Enter all the books into your account (it’s simple - they walk you through it).

4. If you enter 10 books right away, you get two free credits.

5. Think of some books you’ve been wanting to read, but haven’t wanted to spend $12-30 on.

6. Search for those books on the website.

7. Order those books.

8. A couple weeks later, the books come in the mail. FREE!

Now it’s not totally free, don’t be deceived. Whenever someone decides they want one of your books, you have to ship it to them. On your dime. But you get to pay media mail prices, so it’s about $2.50. And every time you send a book, you get a credit to order another one for yourself. Basically you’re paying about $2.50 for each book, which is better than almost any used book store. Plus, less work! Shipping books is easy too. When you get ready to send it out, PBS gives you a label to print. You wrap the book in the sheet of paper, add postage and send it off. If you use stamps or if you pay a small fee for PBS to add postage, you can just drop it in the mailbox. Otherwise you have to go to the post office. Which, yuck. I used stamps.

When your book is received, the receiver has to let PBS know, and then you get your credit. Ta-da! Just like that. It really does work.

If you do decide to sign up, let me know and I’ll give you my email address so you can list me as your referrer. That way I get free credits. Yes, I’m greedy. But I’m using a different email address than the one listed on my contact page, so if you just want to sign up and not list a referrer, I totally don’t blame you.

I’ll just hate you forever.

No I won’t.

Now go swap some paperbacks already!