Does any of us ever grow out of the feeling from our school days, that September is the start of something?  Even though it’s been ahem years since we last matriculated anywhere, every time that hint of crispness comes in the air we get that anticipatory feeling: school supplies! new classes! new locker! new sneakers!  …before we think Oh yeah, we’re old, bummer, September just means new TV shows now.

We weren’t thinking about that brand-new, start-of-the-year feeling back in September 2004 when we launched PBS, but it seems really appropriate now.  That’s right, PBS has made it out of the toddler years!  When we launched the site 5 years ago, we thought it might just end up being a friends-and-family bookswap, although we hoped it could be much more.  We just had a feeling that there might be a ton of people like us who loved to read and would love to find each other through books — and we were right.

There are so many members now.  We have nearly 4 million available books, over half a million unique titles, and over 66 thousand books were mailed in swaps in the last week – over 8000 were mailed just today*.  We love that so many books are finding fresh lives with new readers.  Some copies of books have been swapped a bunch of times!  That’s so much better than sitting on a shelf or going to a landfill.  And at the sibling sites SwapaCD and SwapaDVD things are going strong also – members who belong to more than one of the sites can transfer credits between their accounts (there is a link at the top of your My Account page to do this), and turn books into music, movies into books, et cetera.

We thank everyone who has taken this journey with us – those who have been here from the beginning, those who have just hopped aboard, and everyone who joined along the way.   It’s been another great year of reading and sharing, for all of us.

Happy 5th Birthday, PaperBackSwap!

Richard
and the PaperBackSwap Team

*as of this writing, at ~6:30 PM ET on Sept 1st