Want English language Roald Dahl books for your nine year old? In the market for Dutch romance novels for an adult? For all your book related needs, I am excited to announce that a new KarmaBazaar marketplace is coming soon for residents of Amsterdam – the Book Bazaar.
Edit: The Book Bazaar is now open for business!
What is the Book Bazaar?
The Book Bazaar, like the Clothing Bazaar, is an ask-for-what-you want marketplace with automatic location-based matching. Karma is the currency for all marketplaces at The KarmaBazaar – so karma earned at the Clothing Bazaar can be spent at the Book Bazaar and vice versa.
The Book Bazaar can be used to trade books for all ages. The Book Bazaar deals in book bundles. You donate bundles of books to the bazaar to earn karma, and spend your karma to acquire bundles of books. The smallest bundle size accepted by the Book Bazaar is five books.
A Marketplace or a Library?
The Book Bazaar is whatever you want it to be. You can take the books that you acquire from our marketplace with you to the grave. Or you can read them and then donate them back to us, treating the Book Bazaar as a library with no deadlines or late fees.
When you donate to the Book Bazaar, your account is immediately credited with karma – even before we find a match for the books you donated. This karma is available for you to spend at the bazaar. This means that if you receive a bundle of books, and you don’t like any of them, you lose nothing except the time it took for you to pick them up. Donate the books back to the market, the karma you spent is promptly ‘refunded’ to your account, and you can spend it on another book bundle that may be more to your taste.
How do I ask for what I want?
When a user donates a book bundle to the bazaar, they tell us the following information about the book bundle:
- The age of the reader that the books are suitable for
- The language of the books in the bundle and
- Type of books in the bundle: Fiction, Non-fiction or Mixed
In addition, they can choose to tag the bundle with:
- Author name(s)
- Title(s)
- Genre(s)
For example, if a user is donating a bundle of ten English language books for a nine year old, and the bundle contains three books by Roald Dahl, they can choose to tag the bundle to indicate that the bundle contains some books by Roald Dahl. Tagging is optional and does not have to describe the entire bundle.
When you shop at the book bazaar, you can also specify the same tags – authors, titles or genres that you want the bundle to contain. You also choose whether the tags you chose are required or not.
How does bundle matching work?
When we search for a bundle match, we try and find a bundle as close to you as possible, and one that you can ‘afford’ with the amount of karma you have in your account.
In addition, we attempt to match tags.
If you specified that the tags you chose are required, we will find a match for you only if the bundle contains at least one of the tags you specified.
If you specified tags, but said that tags are not required, we will try and find a bundle with at least one matching tag, but if none exist, we will try and match you to a bundle without any tags.
To tag or not to tag
Using tags is more likely to get you the specific book(s) you want. On the other hand, if those books are not available in the marketplace, you may be in for a long wait. For fiction, using tags, but making those tags optional is probably the best option – you get to keep receiving bundles and reading while you wait for the perfect book(s) to show up. For non-fiction, it might make more sense to use required tags.
When does the Book Bazaar open for business?
The Book Bazaar will open its doors the week of the 12th of February, 2024. Sign up for our newsletter if you want to be notified of the grand opening.