Category: Books

Paperbackswap is a great site for trading books.  I tried several book trading sites and Paperbackswap works the best for me.  You list the books you are done reading, ones that you are willing to trade, and for each one you send off, you can request a book from someone else.  All you pay is shipping on the book you send, $2.09 for most paperbacks.

Here’s how it works:

• You list all the books you are willing to trade.
• When someone requests one of your books:
  • you print out the label that Paperbackswap makes for you,
  • wrap it around the book,
  • tape it,
  • add stamps (Paperbackswap will tell you how much), and
  • send it.
• You get a credit for each book you send.  (You get the credit when the other person receives the book.)
• Once you’ve listed 9 books, they give you 3 credits to get you going.
• You can use a credit to request any book any one else has listed.
• You can also add books to your wishlist so that when someone posts that book, you get an email.  This is how I found out about almost all the books I wanted.

So now when I’m done reading a book:

• I first decide if I just want to keep it. Am I going to read it again?  Look things up occasionally?  Lend it to a friend who I know would enjoy it?
• If I don’t keep it, I check on Amazon.com to see what used copies are selling for.  If they sell for over $2.00, I sell mine.  I list it on Amazon.com and Half.com.
• If I don’t want to keep it and I can’t sell it for much, I list it on Paperbackswap.

So far I’ve listed over 40 books, sent seven books, gotten four and have another three on the way!

Do you remember bibliographies?  That list of all the books you read or quoted while you were writing a paper?  And they all have to be in a special format with all sorts of rules?  (How do you handle multiple authors and does the year go before or after the publisher?)

Well, now there’s a website that creates a bibliography for you: OttoBib.  You type in the ISBN numbers and it spits out a nicely formatted bibliography! 

Now if it would only handle web pages in your bibliography …

Photo by Olivander (Great Old One).

I just finished listening to Brian Tracy’s Success Mastery Academy. (Which I got from Audible.)  While I didn’t agree with everything he said, he had a lot of very good points.  Here are the main ones that stuck with me.  (I listened to it in the car so I couldn’t take notes and I can’t flip back through it.)  Some may seem obvious to you, others may be an "ah-hah," and some you may not agree with at all.

1. You have to work hard to succeed.  And once you’ve done that, everyone will say "how lucky you are!"  So once you’ve worked 80 hour weeks for 10 years, become CEO of your own company, own a nice home and take nice vacations, people will say "you’re so lucky!" So that was really two points:
   • You have to work hard to succeed.
   • People are unlikely to notice how hard you’ve worked.  Most people just want to "get lucky."
2. You have to be happy to make others happy.  None of this "I’m sacrificing so my family, friends, etc. can be happy."  You can’t make them happy if you aren’t happy yourself.
3. Write your goals down.  Not just your career goals, but all your goals for the year.  Start now.  Write down all your goals for 2007.  Think big but be somewhat realistic.  Put them in present tense.  "I got a 5% raise this year," "I run 3 miles a day," "I weigh 125 pounds," … whatever you want.  The more detailed the better.  Even if you don’t do anything with them, writing them down will help.  (If you make them unbelievable like "I won the lottery," "I lost 200 pounds," … they are much less likely to happen than if they are realistic.)
4. Lists are good.  Lots of lists are even better.
5. Listen.  Listen to people.  Listen to people more than you talk.  Ask lots of questions.
6. Treat money like it’s important and you like it.  Dad actually taught me this one.  Don’t play with your money.  Keep it in a safe place.  Value it.  It will "attract" more and you’ll lose less.  Dad even got upset when I got checks with pictures on them.  Checks are money and money is serious. (And the day before I heard this on the tape I was telling our six year old that he needed to keep his money in his wallet in a safe place in his room and not play with it.  I’m not sure I want Frank to learn this one – I make a significant amount of money from wadded up bills in the laundry!)

The book was geared towards people in sales but it had a lot to do with life in general.  If you are in the mood for a self-improvement book, I highly recommend it.

I think owning a book store would be one of the coolest jobs – especially a used book store.  I know it doesn’t pay very well but being around a lot of books, especially well read, well loved books just really appeals to me.   This woman’s story about how she started an online bookstore and is now expanding to a real world store was very inspiring.  She buys books wholesale and sells them through her eBay store.  Her inventory has expanded so much she needs warehouse space and she discovered an opportunity that allows her to rent retail space for the same amount of money, so she is opening a store!

I realized I never told you about one of the best books I read last year!  Social Intelligence.  Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence, has written a new book that focuses on how humans beings connect to each other and how those connections are learned or formed.  He does a good job of balancing very interesting anecdotes with descriptions of how all of this works at the biological level.

He spends a lot of time explaining how these social connections are learned as a child and how what we do or don’t learn when we are young affects us later.  As a mom with a new baby, some of the experiments were actually scary!  He talked about how some moms can naturally tell when their babies need a break and leave them alone for a while and how others continue to "get in their face" and how this changes how the baby interacts with people as an adult!

If you’ve ever wondered how you knew someone was annoyed when they didn’t say anything (or how someone else did and you didn’t) or why you seem to connect so well with some people and not others, or how you could tell if someone is lying, or how much of our behavior is nurture versus nature, … well then you should definitely read this book.  It’s much more of a "why" book than a "how-to" book and it makes for some fascinating reading.

I just found out last week that Daniel Goleman used to teach at the massage school I’m studying at, Boulder College of Massage Therapy.  I wish I’d had a chance to take a class from him! (He now writes books and writes for the New York Times.)