Eco-Libris and Book Mooch

I mentioned Eco-Libris in my post Blog Action Day: Publishing and the Environment.

Raz Godelnik of Eco-Libris recently e-mailed me about the new collaboration of Eco-Libris with BookMooch, a leading book-swapping site.

BookMooch is an international online community for exchanging used books, created by John Buckman. It has more than 500,000 members who exchange books for free, using a simple points system – every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get with it any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch.

Eco-Libris is a green business that works with book readers as well as with publishers, writers, bookstores and other organizations in the book publishing industry to balance out the paper used for printing books by planting trees. Within six months of operation, Eco-Libris already balanced out 10,000 books.

Eco-Libris and BookMooch are partnering now to offer the BookMooch community a special green option – BookMooch members can earn points by planting trees with Eco-Libris. For every 10 books they balance out, they receive a free BookMooch point they can then use to mooch a book for free. They also receive an Eco-Libris sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out, saying ‘One tree planted for this book’, which they can display on their books’ sleeves.

This collaboration lets eco-conscious BookMoochers who love reading, but also care about the environment, to go green and make their reading more sustainable.

Although we authors would love for everyone to buy our books, I appreciate the environmental benefit to sharing books. Balancing out books by planting trees is a good way to offset the environmental impact of publishing. Now these two concepts are combined in this new initiative.

[tags]Eco-Libris, BookMooch, environment[/tags]