Hi

Does anybody know of a book swap in Shanghai of english language books?
I have re-read all my books and they are a bit too expensive to keep buying new ones each week.
Seems to me that there must be a place where we can all get together and exchange our previously read books!
does anyone know of anything?

Cheers
Lindsay

we could maybe start our own thing..I have a few books in English to exchange.

Anyone interested in?

I would be interested, I have a few books to swap and I'm always looking to borrow more!

The Cofee Beanery in Jin Xiao has a book exchange program, with a decent collection. You drop a book off, you pick up a book. Neat idea. Other places should start this.

I would be interested as well. In fact, maybe we should really start a bookswap meeting since finding good books (and cheap) is really hard here. How about I start the ball rolling here? I will gather everyone's information on books, and I will organize a gathering for all of us.
Anyone interested? If interested, please email me at jasmine_liew@hotmail.com with below info:
1) list of books you would like to share
2) type of books you are looking for
3) your contact details
4) any any good suggestions
Looking forward to the bookswap!!

Guys, first of all this is a fantastic initiative that can spare the lives of many people dying of boredom and mental obesity and sedentarism here. Great idea and I fully support it.

Just a suggestion so we could take this to the next level soon and increase the number of people that can participate on this: what if we standardized the format of a book list?

This way it would be easier in the future to store it somewhere in a database and make it easy to browse through hundreds of books (instead of having to go trough very different formats).

And would make it a breeze to expand this thing to people outside Shanghai.

My suggestion:

We create a simple spreadsheet with:

-Name of the book
-Name of the author
-Publisher
-Subject
-Who owns the book (email address shoudl be sufficient)
-Which city is the book at right now (so we could track where it is)

(we could even add ratings, comments and synopsis later).

I think that if we organize it from the start it will be great to grow it very fast in the future resulting in more choice for all of us book readers.

What do you think?

I even have space in a website and could gladly host the list for us.

Let me know what you think.

fyi-thai food station on jianguo zhong rd has a small book exchange, too.

I have 30 to start with! Count me in. Mostly light mysteries but like to share

great idea, please count me.

I'm in .. !! Do we mail the info to Henry .. ? Perhaps the 'swap' point could be a corner of the expat coffee meeting on a Sunday.

Henry_Chinaski wrote:
We create a simple spreadsheet with:

-Name of the book
-Name of the author
-Publisher
-Subject
-Who owns the book (email address shoudl be sufficient)
-Which city is the book at right now (so we could track where it is)

(we could even add ratings, comments and synopsis later).

Let me know what you think.

Excellent idea.

I would add the field "language", since the database could not only cover English books but also Italian, German, French...

Foreign "not English" books are almost impossible to buy here, as far as I know, and there are only very few in the SH Library.

Malcolm01 wrote:The Cofee Beanery in Jin Xiao has a book exchange program, with a decent collection. You drop a book off, you pick up a book. Neat idea. Other places should start this.

Does anyone know where is this place?

If you're interested, I have a book exchange at Valley Gourmet. Around 60+ with people refreshing them every month or so.... Plenty of DAN BROWN in collection (no more PLEASE ) They are mostly english best sellers. Some non Fiction.

Leave one to take one....

821 Nanjing Xi Lu (Shi Men Yi Lu)

www.valleygourmet.com

What a great idea!!! When I left Shanghai a few months ago, I tried in vain to locate such a group. I ended up giving all my paperbacks to my landlady. Among 300 plus books, I remember some by Anne Rice, Dan Brown...

Hello people, guess we have too many different good ideas here, let me summarize above info:

1) Malcolm01 said there is "The Cofee Beanery in Jin Xiao has a book exchange program" please provide further info, esp the address?
2) Henry Chinaski volunteered to hold a list on his website, please provde your contact so that we can send you the list, Henry?
3) Pearltower mentioned about "fyi-thai food station on jianguo zhong rd " please provide further info, esp the exact address?
4) valleygourmet2 recommended "821 Nanjing Xi Lu (Shi Men Yi Lu), Valley Gourmet" Really worth try taking a look!


For time being, 2 people sent me email expressing their interest in the book swap, I have the compiled list below:
- Paulo Coelho, 'The fifth mountain'
- Mitch Albom, 'The five people you meet in heaven'
- Stephen R. Covey, 'The 7 habits of highly effective people'
- Dan Brown, 'Angels and Demons'
- Dan Brown, 'Digital Fortress'
- J.K. Rowling, 'Harry Potter and the half blood prince'
- Bill Clinton, 'My life"
- T. Jefferson Parker, 'Silent Joe'
- James Patterson, 'The Big Bad Wolf'
- Patrick A. Davis, 'The Passenger'
- John J. Nance, 'Blackout'

If anyone interested, you can also send me your list by email jasmine_liew@hotmail.com with below info:
1) book list you have
2) book type you interested in (or exact book title)
3) contact details

Hope this will work out eventually!!!

Just got here a few days ago, so perhaps in a month or so, i'd be rdy to exchange

george orwell, 'animal farm', '1984'


john grisham, 'the summons', 'the testament', 'the runaway jury'
'the last juror', 'the brethern'

dotsdoevsky, 'crime and punishment'

knockknock_ca wrote:

Malcolm01 wrote:The Cofee Beanery in Jin Xiao has a book exchange program, with a decent collection. You drop a book off, you pick up a book. Neat idea. Other places should start this.

Does anyone know where is this place?

on Biyun Lu diagonally across from the main gate of Green Villas - a block from Carrefour and Green City Leisure Center with Decathalon etc; there is the beanery and several restaurants - you can't miss it

Ok guys, I am sorry for my belated reply but I've got a terrible cold in addition to being busy as hell.

I created a little page with some of the books that I would be willing to lend myself.

You can access it here: http://www.omni-china.com/books/bookexchange.htm

If we download the template found at http://www.omni-china.com/books/bookexchange.xls we will have a database that takes a very short amount of time to update. Also, if I receive spreadsheets in this formatit will be a breeze to automatically create the little column "Click to send inquiry". This is a macro that will automatically open your email client, populate relevant fields (sender and subject) with the title of the book, saving us time.

This means people might know your email address. If you have a problem with this, either insert an email address that you dont use much or, when sending me the spreadsheet with your book list, please specify that you will rather be contacted via PM here. It really doesnt matter how you are contacted as long as the books get moving But if you want to get it moving via email, then you must inform me your email address (no, I wont spam you with penis enlargement offers).

The system is very simple and rudimentary but hey, it is alive at least

I will, time permitting, be including more functionality on it (such as a proper tracking system, search engine, etc, etc, etc.)

I appreciate if you could stick with the excel spreadsheet format (please send me a PM if your computer cannot access the document). This will make maintenance a breeze.

After filling up your own spreadsheet please send it to hc@mygreenhead.com and I will try to update the file as soon as possible (at least weekly or 2 times per week).

Getting the books delivered: our company uses a service provider that could do next day deliveries in all of Shanghai. Perhaps we could use the same company. I think that the better way would be to meet face to face with a cup of coffee and talk about the books and all that, but if this is not possible then we have to use a proper company to do it as efficiently as possible. If anyone has any suggestion, please bring it forward. We could always let the individuals chose the preferred way to exchange the books.

One thing that I think would be good is that if we want this to become really big we should not include books with any politically sensitive topic for obvious reasons!!!

I know it takes a while to type the books information in the spreadsheet BUT the benefits are well worth it.

Last but not least: I have included the language (tks itaye ) and the ISBN column. This will probably be useful in the future to link our database automatically with reviews in amazon or the like (I will probably include a macro to generate hyperlinks to amazon automatically).

That's it for now. Any feedback highly appreciated.

rgds,
HC.

Excellent job, Henry, thanks for all that.

Wow very professional! I thought we would just all meet up at Starbucks or wherever with our books and swap them - very low-tech.

Henry_Chinaski wrote:My suggestion:

We create a simple spreadsheet with:

-Name of the book
-Name of the author
-Publisher
-Subject
-Who owns the book (email address shoudl be sufficient)
-Which city is the book at right now (so we could track where it is)

(we could even add ratings, comments and synopsis later).

I have created a simple spreadsheet at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shanghaibookswap

Anyone with a yahoo ID can join and participate for free.

You can import and export the tables to and from your computer, so you can have the database on hand and not need to go online every time you want to see it.

to join the group, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shanghaibookswap/join