A new book-bartering network has launched, aiming to give a corporate look to what has thus far been a home-grown and community-oriented business. NovelAction.com opened last month, and its online space operates more like a store than a bulletin board, with virtual shopping carts, a checkout area and someone monitoring for "quality control." The new company is building on a model developed by founders of existing "member-to-member" book trading sites such as Bookins.com, BookMooch.com and PaperBackSwap.com.
NovelAction.com's founder is Dianne Denton, a former pharmaceutical marketing exec with no bookselling or publishing experience. She started the site because she saw a need, from both her personal desire and from trying other book-trading sites, for "a centralized, economical exchange venue that provides book lovers with a great selection of used books, reasonable shipping costs and reliable service."
What differentiates NovelAction.com from member-to-member sites is its centralized inventory and the privacy granted to members. Members pay a $25 annual fee and send their used books to Denton (for now, she keeps the books in a room in her Chicago home). For every book members send, they receive one that they've selected from the site's list—or they can choose to ship many books and receive one at a time, using the site's "Book Buck" credit system. Members pay to ship books to NovelAction.com; Denton suggests they use the media mail rate, which allows them to send up to six pounds of books (13 to 17 paperbacks) for $4.80. Denton said this shipping arrangement is cheaper than what members pay at member-to-member trading sites (NovelAction.com members mail books only to Denton, for instance, whereas Bookins.com members mail books to each other—at $3.99 per book). Bookins.com founder Mitchell Silverman said, "To me, [NovelAction.com] looks like a used-book store" rather than a true member-to-member site like his operation, which is free to participants.
NovelAction.com's streamlined process may be attractive, but its inventory is nowhere near that of other sites, especially PaperBackSwap.com. Denton said NovelAction.com's offerings are "in the thousands," but PaperBackSwap.com claims to have 790,000 titles available. Most of the titles on PW's current bestseller list are not available on NovelAction.com, and the selection skews toward romance and other mass market genres. Denton declined to reveal how many people have used the site. If NovelAction is to gain the kind of traction Denton hopes for, its success may hinge on whether readers prefer to interact with one another through such sites as Bookins.com, or work with a third party.
