Ten days ago I hosted my first "Meet and Mooch" in London: [forum:london_moochers] using the Meet and mooch feature.

It was a great success, with about 25 people coming despite the crazy, snowy weather. You can easily organize your own meet and mooch at: http://bookmooch.com/m/meetings -- and it will automatically get promoted to moochers nearby.

What I hadn't expected is that many people brought lots of books that were not (yet) in their BM inventory. These were generally highly-in-demand books that people wanted to give to people they met in person. Or, they were books that people saw on others' wishlists, and were kindly offering from their collection. They didn't want to list them in their inventory, because they didn't want them to be accidentally mooched until after the meeting.

BookMooch doesn't have an easy way to "receive a book face to face". The usual way is to list the book in your inventory, reserve it, and then the other person mooches it, and then finally they mark it as received. Too many steps!

That's why I've added a new feature today: "Face to face".

You can find a button for this feature on the book details page:

How it functions is very simple: you indicate who is giving you this book, and everything else happens in one step.

Here is the "face to face" page:

After your enter the giver's name (or email address) the book is automatically added to their inventory, mooched, one point is transferred and the book is marked as received--all automatically!

I also added this feature to BookMooch Mobile

One other thing I found at the Meet and Mooch, is that I wanted to recommend a book to someone, but had no easy to way to do that with the BookMooch mobile interface. So, today I added a "Recommend this book" button to the mobile interface.

If you're like me, you're always talking about books to your friends, and recommending they read them. Now, you can use your mobile phone and bookmooch to send them an email recommendation in one easy step.

That's it for now!

-john

It makes sense that it would, as I am accruing no shipping costs, but it would be nice to have a few points more than the books cost me. In the past, I have either posted all the books and given a refund of points or posted only some of the books. Although I worry that the latter would eventually adversely affect my ratio. How will the face-to-face mooches be counted in the ratio?

Thanks for the great work!

People like me who have few BM members in their country and mooch mostly internationally won't likely be using this feature, and the less buttons on the page the better.
And even in the US, Canada and other countries with large numbers of BMers, there will probably be a lot of people living in secluded areas or otherwise unable or unwilling to meet, so they won't be using this button either.

You mentioned face-to-face would transfer one point. When the moocher is from another country, will that also be one point?

A face-to-face exchange is always one point, and the mooch happens in the country of the book giver, regardless of the book receiver's country.

A nice and useful feature for people who live in countries that have lots of BM members like US or UK, but I'd suggest making it optional like the one that shows/hides Amazon prices. People like me who have few BM members in their country and mooch mostly internationally won't likely be using this feature, and the less buttons on the page the better.

I agree: what I'm doing about this in general, is that I'm planning an overhaul of the book details page, as I think there are too many buttons there at the moment and the information on the page could be better presented.

Probably, what will happen during this overhaul is that the less-used features (like this new face-to-face feature) will get moved to a drop-down menu list of actions, like what you see on the wishlist page.

-john

I don't think this is an improvement.

As for highly wished/popular books, the book owner is entitled to do what they like with them, that's why they're the book owner.
Get over it, I'm sure there's plenty of books you own, & other moochers would like, but can't have/get for one reason or another.
That's just the way of it.