I can safely say that I have been kept well and truly busy recently with so many of you getting into the book exchange spirit and sending us a fantastically diverse range of books for other readers to sample, cherish and fall in love with.

We were right there with those of you who felt a jolt of sadness yesterday when it was announced that the social reading site Goodreads will be joining the Amazon ‘family’. The big question on everyone's lips now is will they devour or nurture...

Founded in San Francisco in 2007 in Otis Chandler’s front room Goodreads is one of the most prominent online communities for readers with over 16 million members using it worldwide.

We are thrilled and delighted to announce that our charity partner this year is the Children’s Reading Fund and we will be donating 20p to them for every book traded-in through our recycled-readers book exchange scheme.

I'm delighted to say - The Book Exchange is one year old this month!  How amazing is that?  To celebrate we are offering free delivery on all books bought during March.  Please do take advantage and join our pre-loved books party :o)

Happy new year book exchangers!

I did it – I made it through 2012 remembering to note down the books I read and the date I finished them – hooray!  With 44 books on the list I didn’t read quite as much as I would have liked to but I really did enjoy some absolute corkers as you will see from my top picks of the year blog post.  Quite a few of 2012's reads came courtesy of the fantastic books you traded-in as part of our recycled reading scheme so a giant thank you to everyone who exchanged books with us last year, not only have we been able to donate lots of pennies to The Dyslexia Research Trust on your behalf we have also been able to up-cycle some magnificent literary treasures in the process!

In his book How Bad Are Bananas? Mike Berners-Lee reports that the average adult spends a whopping £440 on Christmas presents, madness when you realise that approx. 20% of that is unwanted bits of tacky Christmas tat - creating the same carbon impact as consuming 3500 bananas! 

Are you looking for a friendly independent provider of good-quality pre-loved English-language books to be shipped to your homes outside of the UK?  If so I can now confirm we can be that friendly independent provider and will happily send our lovely new-to-you books to all you readers from further afield.

This week marks the 240th birthday of the magnificent Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) one of our most famous English poets, Romantics, literary critics and philosophers who, with his dear old chum William Wordsworth, founded the Romantic movement towards the end of the 18th century.

Fancy following in the footsteps of award winning novelist Hilary Mantel winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize (making her the first woman and first Briton to win twice!) and carving out a career writing fiction?  Then look no further than American writer Elmore Leonard who has also seen phenomenal success over his life-time, publishing his first fictional short-story Trail of the Apache in 1951 aged just 26.

What do you do what your book collection gets out of control and you find yourself completely surrounded (some might say drowning) in books?  A recent BBC article described how Hernando Guanlao found himself in that position in 2000, with books completely taking over his home.