Finally, the people behind Bookshop.org, the online platform for independent booksellers, have come up with an ingenious solution to this age-old conundrum.
Likened to Vinted and Depop, Bookloop by Bookshop.org is a groundbreaking new circular concept that allows you to swap your unwanted books for credits to spend at Bookshop.org. Powered by Zeercle, whose mission is to ‘promote sustainability in the retail industry’, the service is free – and staggeringly easy – to use.
All you do is scan the barcode of the books you want to pass on and indicate whether you’d like to take them to a DPD drop-off location or have them collected from your front door. To use the platform, you need to sell at least £5 worth of second-hand books. Bearing in mind that some titles that were bestsellers in recent memory are valued as low as 30p today, it may be best to wait until you’ve accumulated quite a stack.
“Likened to Vinted and Depop, Bookloop by Bookshop.org is a groundbreaking new circular concept that allows you to swap your unwanted books for credits to spend at Bookshop.org
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When Zeercle has received your books, you’ll be sent tokens to spend on new books at Bookshop.org. Meanwhile, your unwanted books will be resold or donated.
Read, recycle, redeem – get it?
All royalties made on the books that Bookloop resells will be distributed to authors via a fund called Bookloop by Bookshop.org for Authors, so that authors don’t suffer from the boom in second-hand bookselling.
Bookshop.org’s Mark Thornton says: ‘We’re always saying the best way to support bookshops is in person. But on the other side of that, the inexorable rise of online book purchases means we have to find new ways of looping all of these things together, so that we’re all in this shared endeavour of supporting a really positive reading culture, with independent bookshops at its heart.’
Bookloop is a win for us, a win for authors and a win for the planet.
