get your swap shoes on

[sleepfighter]

Hello readers, to one and all. This is your first warning that swaps-within-a-swap are coming, or to say that Candy, Drink and Book Yuletide Swaps are going to happen again, and we'd like to have the sign-ups for them pretty darn soon, or within the first half of October. Why this early? Because we gotta try and beat the holiday shopping and

Comments

[themistoklis]

I'd love to participate in these swaps again! Last year was my first year. Unfortunately, there is no way I could consider paying those prices for international shipping from the US. :( I'd only be able to match internationally if someone wanted an ebook.

[carmarthen]

I'm outside the US and not only unlikely to be able to afford international shipping, but tbh I only want ebooks at the moment. I wonder if it would be practical to have an ebook subcategory for Bookswap (although you do start running into complex international drm issues, possibly).

[sleepfighter]

I am glad to report that ebooks have always been an option for book swap (and is even listed in the FAQ!), and we prioritize ebook senders to people who want to receive ebooks whenever possible, though as an option it has not always been very popular. I think we only ever got up to about 5% of senders preferring to send ebooks per bookswap, and only a few senders of ebooks last year.

tl;dr: We will be glad to match up people who want to send and receive ebooks.

[carmarthen]

Ah, it wasn't clear to me from the FAQ if it was definitely an option to do ebook only, or if you still had to be willing to send/receive paper books as well. Cool!

I will have to think about it! I can definitely see why paper books are more popular (and I was in that category myself once), but it's just not so practical for me this year.

[themistoklis]

Oh, I didn't think about DRM. I don't know how to work that. Maybe if you buy from a website based in the other country and mark the file as a gift to be sent to whoever's email address?

[sleepfighter]

Just jumping in to say that if anyone has any good DRM-free bookseller resources, we could always use more. I know BAEN is pretty good, and so is Smashwords which we should add to our resources list this year, but more sources are always great!

[tielan]

Crossroad Press is DRM-free!

[jessalae]

All Tor e-books are DRM-free!

[carmarthen]

There are some retailers (and publishers) that don't use DRM, but that tends to limit the selection a lot (and skew heavily self-pubbed). I'm not sure whether you can buy ebooks from, say, Amazon UK, as a gift for someone if you have a US address for your credit card. My suspicion is no, since there would be no way for Amazon to check that the recipient is in the UK.

I assume people have dealt with this in the past somehow.

[boosette]

Bookview Cafe, also DRM-free: http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/reading-bvc-ebooks/