International mooch bank (BM Health)

Forum: BM Health

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International mooch bank

High postage rates in some countries makes BM to expensive for some international mooches. This is an idea that may help.

An international mooch bank could be made.
* A moocher could purchase points. Say $2 for 1point
* This money would be used to purchase a book for the users inventory
- the book would be purchased in the country of the users choice (say the US). And would never actually be sent to the international moocher.
* Moochers from the country where the book is purchased will be able to mooch this book as if it was from the international moocher.

So BM would act as a middle man making it cheaper for international moochers to obtain points.

Please point out what you do not like about this but also say if you would participate.

Gar
13 years ago

Comments

While I like to see people brainstorming ideas to add more books to the Bookmooch inventory, I don't see this one working (at least not as you describe it). For one thing, I can't imagine spending 5 points for a book. There are very few used books I would spend 3 points on. 5 points works out to around $12-15. I can't think of many used books I would want to spend that much for. And if I have money to spend to put toward
Bookmooch I would use it to pay for postage to mail books. The problem isn't that there aren't enough books around to post onto Bookmooch, the problem for many of us is the money to pay for postage to mail the books.

Cara
13 years ago

Sorry Cara I had edited by post while you were writing yours (so there is no longer any mention of 5points)

Yes postage is an unfortunate problem. I find that I have to send international books via surface mail for BM not to be too expensive for me.

I was thinking this bank would be useful for countries like Australia where second hand books are expensive and postage is also very expensive compared to the UK where second hand books are cheap and postage from UK to Austrialia is less then a third of postage from Australia to the UK.

Gar
13 years ago

The idea is interesting but I wonder if it couldn't do some damage, by encouraging anyone whose postal rates mean points are typically more expensive than 2$ each (and I think that may include even US users who don't regularly get multibooks requests) to just buy points, instead of providing books to the collective BM inventory.

Aude
13 years ago

I was thinking this would only be available in countries that do the vast majority of their mooching internationally, say countries like Peru, Australia and many many others that have too few members to have a domestic mooch market.

The system will have to be monitored for abuse but if purchased points could only be used to mooch internationally this would help avoid some abuse. This would make the system quite complicated though.

Gar
13 years ago