I love to read. I read books for a variety of reasons: about topics that interest me, books that are related to my work, or just for the fun of a good story. While I am able to minimize the expense of this by purchasing many of the books used, it still can add up after awhile.

A secondary issue arises in what to do with the books after I have read them. I donate a number of them, but I always feel like a good book is a friend and I would prefer to see them go into the hands of someone who wants to read them. I just discovered a site called PaperBackSwap.com.



It began in 2004 as a way for book readers to share their already-read books with each other via the Internet. It only requires an email address, a valid US address, and internet access. Currently there are over 3 million books listed on the site and over 65,000 members. It has been consistently praised in the media - here are a just a few of the many many mentions:

• Television shows: Good Morning America, The Today Show, and CNN
• Magazines: People, Oprah, Real Simple, and Reader's Digest.
• Newspapers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and LA Times
• Internet: eHow, Lifehacker.com, and Forbes.com

Click here for a full list and links

The website is free to use - there are no member fees, although it does say that there may be some in the future. It costs you nothing to receive books...the cost is on the sender of the books.

It is simple in it's workings - you list books that you want to pass on to their next home. The system will match your books to people who are waiting for them. The sender then prints two pieces of paper from their printer, wraps the item with those papers, attaches postage and drops it in the mail. The requesting member gets the book for free! Senders do have to pay for postage when they mail an item. Since these mail via media rate, it is only $2-3 per book. There is a "Box-O-Books" feature which allows you and another user to swap an equal number of books at one time, which saves on postage...maybe as low as $0.38 per/book.

There are a couple of companion sites too:


Swapacd.com — Fans can access more than 130,000 available titles. Load in your own CD titles and join the community to starting earning credits. It does cost 49 cents plus one credit and shipping to score a CD from another member.



Swapadvd.com — Movie collectors can trade both new and classic DVD titles. Not as big as the other two...but wait until word gets out.

Then there is this link at the bottom of the other sites - perhaps another sister site coming soon? SwapAGoat.com

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This is the first in a series of posts about how to create an effective resume. Yes, really....another one of them.

I know, there are thousands of resume experts out there competing for your attention. Many of them say the basically same thing, although possibly in different terms. Half make you feel like writing a good resume is so intimidating you couldn't possibly do it on your own - so you really need to hire a professional...they just happen to be available. The other half says you really can do it on your own...but only if you buy their {book, DVD, etc}

I am writing a series of articles that will give many of you the information you need to write a good resume all on your own - nothing to buy....EVER

After writing resumes and/or training people to write their own resume for 20+ years, I have found there are some basics that are always effective. I do not focus on the most current trends in resume writing, instead I focus on the basics that will will stand the test of time. I refer to this as the "little black dress" of resume writing. This theory works for:

• A thriving economy
• Times of record high unemployment
• First job
• Changing careers
• Returning to workforce after a break
• Career position
• Blue-collar jobs
• White-collar positions

The same principles apply whether you are applying for a career position, a temporary job, an internship or a volunteer position. These are all "jobs", just different types of jobs.

Before beginning to write a resume, it is important to figure out just what we are trying to accomplish.

There only one reason to write a resume: to get an interview. That's it. Period.

When an employer is looking at your resume (or application) he is looking for one thing - a reason why he doesn't *have* to interview you.

For a single position, there are between 20 and 200 resumes submitted. Note: This varies wildly depending on the job, the job market, etc. Even for internships and volunteer position, employers will receive far more applicants than there are positions available. There is no way an employer will actually consider all of these candidates, so they read the resumes looking for a reason to not have to consider an applicant at all.

Imagine Bob sitting in HR with a stack of resumes a foot deep on his desk. Bob has been told that the manager will only schedule 10 interviews. Bob now has to go through all of these and pick out the best 10 applicants. While each company has it's own methods...many of them go something like this: scan through a resume until it can be placed in one of three piles:

• Must Interview - this person is so right for the job, we'd be crazy to not interview this person
• Possible Interview - meets the basic requirements
• No Interview - does not meet basic qualifications or would not be a good fit
  

Bob now has a smaller stack of resumes to work on...but there may be 20 resumes in the Must Interview pile. That means that all of those very qualified people in the Possible Interview pile are no longer in consideration.

It is not enough to just avoid giving Bob a reason to put you in the "No Interview" pile. You have to make sure there are plenty of reasons for Bob to put your resume in the "We'd be crazy to not interview this one" pile.

Of course, Bob must further narrow down the Must Interview pile to the 10 interview slots. This is where all sort of little details can influence the decision. A misspelled word, perhaps the difference between 'WordPerfect' & 'Microsoft Word', the choice of paper...all sorts of picky details can make the difference between two otherwise perfect applicants.

Future installments in this series will look at all the details of how to be in the Must Interview pile and (equally important) get Bob's attention when he is selecting resumes for the limited interview slots.

Stay tuned...

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There has been a lot of talk recently about print newspapers going away. While they will continue (for now anyway) as online publications, it has caused people to ask themselves if newspapers have reached the end of their life cycle. I think newspapers provide a critical service to all of us, and I am not so sure that other sources of media are ready to step up and fill the gap.

Reading a newspaper is an activity that engages us on several levels. While the news can be read online, it is not the same thing - any more than a Kindle is the same as a book, or online graphics have the same beauty as a photograph. When a newspaper closes, we all lose something much more important than a few minutes of enjoyment. If the newspapers go away, so do the reporters. Newspapers have an obligation to the community:
- to provide complete information
- to verify the information before reporting it
- to report impartially
- to clearly separate opinion from fact
- to report what is important, even if the rest of us were not paying attention.

There are certainly variations in how successful a given paper is at achieving these goals. Bloggers and others who provide online 'news', however, do not have the same mandate. For the most part they are free to write whatever they want, with limited or no oversight and no responsibility to get it right. Ian Jack at The Guardian puts it very well:

Online journalism is cheap to produce because it depends so much on personal assertion and on untested information taken or supplied free by individuals, institutions and organisations.

If we lose newspapers, we become far more reliant on the Official Version of events. This is critical since much of what we think, feel and believe comes from our understanding of the world around us. Now imagine that everything we know about that world is only the version the government wants us to know.

It is no less scary when considering things at the local level. When a paper closes, democracy loses. In a community with competing papers, it is easier to print news that may be less than favorable to the "movers & shakers". Once the town is down to one paper, it becomes harder to investigate those in power. Once there is no paper, there will be little if any real reporting of local news. People will become far less invested in local politics (then they are already) because they will not have local papers telling them they should care.

Martin Moore talks about this issue in a recent blog posting. In his quotes a study which in part says:

The authors concluded that the loss of the newspaper ‘made local elections less competitive along several dimensions’, notably ‘incumbent advantage, voter turnout, and the number of candidates for office’. Although this paper was focused on a single city, it also cites another study, still in manuscript, that finds, based on 7,000 US towns and cities, that if a town has its own daily or weekly paper the political incumbent has less advantage than if it doesn’t (Jessica Trounstine, Princeton, manuscript, 2009).

When a newspaper folds we all lose. So far, the other news media (internet, radio, television) is not ready to fill the gap it leaves behind.

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