UPDATE, June 2012: I no longer recommend Swap.com (formerly known as Swaptree), as their customer service is nonexistent. They have lost their BBB accreditation in part for failing to respond to a complaint I filed.

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Last December reader Robert asked me if I’d tried the bartering service Swaptree, which I had not. I signed up that week and now, about 40 trades later, I can offer a pretty strong recommendation.

The site’s concept is very simple: You enter a list of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games that you own and would be willing to trade, entering ISBN/UPC info plus a note on the item’s condition. Then you enter a list of items you wish to receive in trade. Swaptree looks for matches between users – direct one-for-one swaps as well as three-person swaps – and notifies all parties when it finds one, giving you a chance to reject the deal if you don’t think it’s fair. You pay the shipping cost, and can print labels directly through swaptree (media mail unless it’s not a book or the package is so light that first-class is cheaper), usually running between $2.20 and $2.80. I send all items in padded envelopes, so my cost per item runs to around $3.50, but some people just wrap books in brown paper or take other shortcuts.

My wife and I went to clear some stuff out of our storage space on Saturday, and I went through a few boxes of books, pulling 20-25 with which I was willing to part. By Wednesday, I’d swapped 15 of them.

I’ve only had one bad experience on swaptree, with an item that was (allegedly) lost in the mail. The sender didn’t use swaptree or another trackable service, so we can’t confirm that the item was ever sent, and there’s really no recourse for me – I was just SOL, having sent a book but not received one. Swaptree’s customer service was close to nonexistent: they contacted the other user, and I guess they’ll suspend someone who has too many complaints, but after receiving their initial automated response to my “I didn’t receive an item” complaint, I didn’t hear back from them again. Looking at feedback for other users, I don’t think non-receipt is a big problem, and I haven’t had any problems with other trades.

Swaptree doesn’t do much to help you browse the often lengthy list of items you can get in trade but that aren’t on your “Items I Want” list. There’s no way to filter books by genre or to tell the system that you already own a book, and since the most popular books on swaptree are, of course, popular books by James North Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts, browsing really means sifting through a lot of crap in the hopes that you’ll find something that catches your eye. In fact, right now, I can get Snow Falling on Cedars in trade, which is stupid, since I’m reading the book now and I already entered the book as one I own but don’t wish to trade.

On the plus side, I’ve executed some rather absurd swaps that worked out great. I traded an old computer game someone bought me a few years ago – a very bad RPG called Temple of Elemental Evil – for a Janet Evanovich book for my wife. I traded a brand-new Angelina Ballerina DVD that we already had (and watch every night…) for a copy of Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove). I traded Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus (my least favorite of his novels, which I haven’t touched in over a decade) for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And so on.

It’s worked out well for us so far – we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of books that we didn’t want, which is good, since our book collection is rather out of control, while we’ve gotten a number of books that we might otherwise have bought new or not bought at all. It’s easy to use, at least in terms of entering your “have” and “want” lists, but you’re relying on the honor system to some degree to get your books, and it can easily take a week or more for a book shipped media mail to traverse the country. (This doesn’t matter to me, since I usually have a backlog of at least a dozen books to read.) Item conditions have nearly always been at or above what was promised. And the cost is slight, even including the $1 monthly fee swaptree charges in months where you use their shipping-label service. They’re currently running a promotion that gives you a free shipping credit if you invite a friend to swaptree who then makes a trade by the end of November. So give it a whirl.