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Questions about PaperBackSwap
Topic: At what level of "Books Available" does this site no longer function?
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About six months ago there were around 850,000 books listed. Shortly after the February membership renewal process ended there were 817,000. Today, March 8, there are 812,000 listed, of which the top 100 posted books total nearly 15,500. What is the low water mark at which this site can no longer function? |
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I imagine the club dynamics are more dependent upon how many books are being sent out versus how many are sitting on shelves. Many members keep their shelves on hold or deal only in WL books. In fact, there's a lot of WL activity, which involves books that are not posted to shelves but count as transactions. Here's a snapshot of the Pulse of PBS, from the link at the bottom of the page: Books
Books Mailed
Members
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OK, you got me, so I used the internet's Wayback machine to take a look and see what was. Here are the stats for September 2022: Books
Books Mailed
Members
And here is July 2021: Books
Books Mailed
Members
This shows a significant drop in members, books available, and transactions. I'm not going to venture into the "why" of what happened. But again, what is the low water mark at which this venue no longer becomes feasible? |
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I think Linda is right, it's not so much about titles posted as the number of books being mailed out. None of the books being swapped in the games are 'posted', but get mailed out at the end of each game or swap. And books 'mailed to a friend' but not thru the fifo system don't get counted as 'posted' either. --today's stats don't include the 2 game books I just marked 'mailed' today. Also, if public profiles are over 144,000 members, I wonder how many people are members but not social on here so we don't see their profile ever. |
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We don't know the expenses of maintaining the website, server costs, IT, hosting etc. Mostly volunteers do the general upkeep so I think they do try to keep expenses low, but there are definite costs involved. We also don't know the revenue coming in from membership fees, swapping and postage fees. From the numbers we're shown, we can't really deduce if the net operating income stays the same, increases or declines. As to what would be too low to keep it viable, that would be an executive decision. If it happened, I would hope there would be a grace period or fair warning, rather than an abrupt end, but you can never know. We don't hear from TPTB as much as we used to. It would be really tough for me though since I've been here for almost 17 years and swapping books and participating in the forums and games has been a great hobby. |
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I guess I'll weigh in on this. Several members have told me that they are continuing to order books but are no longer sending books out, stating that it is simply too expensive. Which means they are not POSTING books which then drops available inventory. Credits sales by members are still limited to $3 each while a small book costs $4.13 to mail. I think to break (what I perceive to be) the log jam that the guys need to allow the market place determine the price of credits. And that PBS itself stop selling credits itself because that also contributes heavily to the disparity between cost of a credit vs. actual cost to mail a book. My 2 cents. |
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I used to send A LOT of books. But at $4 per book to send, it's cheaper for me to just buy credits and requests books. Now that barely anything is posted, I'm being forced to buy a lot from ebay, too. |
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