Ah, September. Summer’s over…back to school…the weather will be mild for a while longer. What could be better?
September is a lot of things: National Library Card Sign-up Month, National Pediculosis Prevention Month (you don’t want to know!), National Read-a-New-Book Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Better Breakfast Month. It contains the holidays National Newspaper Carriers’ Day, National Grandparents’ Day (this Sunday!), International Literacy Day, POW/MIA Recognition Day (the third Friday of the month) and Patriot Day (the eleventh, of course). Past Septembers saw these new inventions appear: the safety pin, Scooby-Doo, the department store, the first edition of the New York Times….September is a month of beginnings and remembrances, of starting new and also looking back.
We are looking back at 4 years of PaperBackSwap! Yes, we launched in September 2004. Since then the club has grown beyond anything we could have expected. Nearly 4 million books have been swapped between members; innumerable features have been added; sister swapping sites for CDs and DVDs were launched; we’ve been mentioned in more media outlets than we can name–major magazines, innumerable blogs, television news spots, even the Wall Street Journal! During all this, we have “met” a ton of people whom we think of fondly as family. Our members have been so patient as we work to improve the site. Members who started out with us will recall that in the beginning we didn’t even have Personal Messaging! We’ve come a long way. And everything we do starts with the members–you tell us how you use the site, what’s not working for you, what you’d like to see–and we listen, and look at the issue from all angles, and try hard to find a way to solve the problems and implement the suggestions. Sometimes it takes a while to get to something (our To Do list is huge!) but rest assured that if we can do something, and it will benefit the membership, we’ll find a way to do it.
We think of every feature we add, every improvement, as a kind of “present” to our members. We really try to make this site better wherever we can. See “NEWS” below for the new features this month–sorry we didn’t have time to wrap!
Happy Birthday to all of us!
Richard and
The PaperBackSwap Team
Tags: Milestones
