If you were swapping books in the UK any time in the 2010s, there is a good chance you had a ReadItSwapIt account. It let members trade books directly with each other, no credits, no middleman, just one book for another, and for over a decade it was the closest thing the UK had to a proper book swap community.
What ReadItSwapIt actually was
ReadItSwapIt ran on a simple idea. You listed books you had finished with, browsed what other members were offering, and proposed a straight swap. No points system, no waiting for credits to build up, just you and another reader agreeing to post each other a book. Its main swapping service closed in 2017, after running for well over a decade.
Why a free direct swap site was hard to keep running
Direct swapping only works if enough people are listing and enough people want the same books at the same time. Running that matching problem at scale, for free, for years, is a genuinely hard thing to fund, and the cracks eventually showed.
the site has been creaking very badly over the last few months
Why this matters again now
Book swapping isn't a nostalgia trip. It's arguably more relevant today than it was when ReadItSwapIt was running. UK book buying has been reshaped by BookTok over the last few years, readers are buying more, reading faster, and running into the same shelf space problem that made direct swapping appealing in the first place.
UK book buying, by the numbers
Where UK readers have been trading books since
Some former ReadItSwapIt members moved to international credit-based swap sites, others just went back to charity shops and local Facebook groups. None of it quite replaced the simplicity of a direct, UK-only swap, no credits to earn first, no waiting your turn.
The sad news has been publicised. Members have been re-directed to BookMooch.com.
What a direct swap platform needs to get right this time
The demand ReadItSwapIt tapped into hasn't gone anywhere, if anything BookTok has made it bigger. What a modern version needs that the old one didn't have is a way to match readers automatically on genre and want lists, rather than leaving people to browse listings manually and hope for a match.
Already read it? Swap or sell it on Swopsee.
Freya DoyleSwopsee team
Writes about the stuff people swap and why. Currently obsessed with working out what actually makes something worth trading rather than binning.
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