I receive and send books... and have enjoyed being on this site.  Every so often I find a member who seems to have  mailed many books and received few or none.  Given the cost of postage, I can't help but wonder what is going on.  Is this just altruism? is there some other explanation?

Paul, are you seeing zero sent or is there a dash there? Most members dont realize that the default setting is set to not allow members to see the number of books mailed and book received. In order to make the number of each show on a member's profile, they will have to go into their settings page, and set their Privacy Controls to allow these numbers to been seen. I notice your account is set to the default, as you have dashes in both fields.

Paul, some possibilities I can come up with to explain those with books mailed >> books received:

1) stockpiling credits

2) transferring them to the sister sites to "spend" on CDs and/or DVDs

3) selling the credits (this can be profitable if you can cut lots of multi-credit deals and have a cheap source of used books)

4) donating the credits to PBS related causes (for example, see the apple and the blue/gray symbol next to Cheryl G's name)

Another possibility is they're saving credits for WL books that are slow in coming.

Cheryl, thanks for the info regarding the saved/received in the member profile.  Didn't realize it defaulted to "hidden".

Regarding the dashes that display if hidden: is it possible to hide one (received) and not the other (sent)?  Paul said that he noticed the person had sent lots of books, so that one was not hidden.

I just checked the privacy conrols and yes, you can hide one but not the other.

I think of it as a hobby. Plus looking for books for other people is educational, since WL books are often books I am not acquainted with. I like being on the Top Swapper list. Right now I don't need to order a lot of books for myself; I could always order some later or use my credits getting new books to use as gifts in the PBS Market. I also give credits away in some instances.

Well I know for me for a long time I had more than twice as many books sent than received.  I had a huge pile of WL books when I joined and I had a house to sell and one to buy and a cross country move to make. So I was mailing out a lot of books but not ordering that many.  Simply to have less books to move. I would just sell credits every so often to recoup some postage costs.  But even after selling credits on a regular basis-for the first 18m or so that I was here, I rarely had less than 70 credits. 

Now I rarely have more than 10 because I no longer have the postage budget and order more books.