I have a lot of books and video games that I won’t ever read or play again. For books, I had ventured out to my local used book store a couple of times, but the way the credit works usually makes me not want to go back and actually use that credit. For video games, I either sell them on e-bay for anywhere from $5 to $20 or trade them in at the local Gamestop.

I figured there had to be a better way of recycling these items so I went looking around and found swaptree.com. Swaptree allows you to trade books, video games, music and movies with others for free. After signing up, you enter in UPC and ISBN numbers to populate the list of things you have and are willing to trade. You can also search for and select things that you want in return.  These are your “have” and “want” lists.

Swaptree finds matches with other people and sends you both an email to setup the trade, and both parties can either accept or reject the trade.  Swaptree will also not propose a trade for two items of unequal value (like a book for a recently released video game). If both parties accept, you’re then given a link to print a shipping label. The shipping cost is then charged to your credit card.  So far it looks like normal shipping costs range from $2.50 to $3.50. But it just depends on the weight of the item.  I’m sure shipping an encyclopedia would be more expensive than $3.50.

I’ve accepted 5 trades so far and shipping out all my items this morning. I have 3 new books and 2 new video games coming in, and I’ve spent about $15. Not bad considering the books and games I traded were sitting on the shelf for months collecting dust.

Do you know of any other sites out there where you can trade these kinds of items? How do they stack up against Swaptree.com?