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 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.

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!

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.

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. 

As you know here at Book Exchange HQ we are firm believers in creating a green and sustainable reading community which is why we developed our ‘recycled-reader’ scheme.  A forum for you to up-cycle your used books in-to ‘new-to-you’ titles, saving you money and the nation land-fill.  We are delighted then that next week, in partnership with Waste Watch we will be celebrating the first ever Waste less, Live more Week.  Signalling the start of a national campaign aiming to raise awareness of how environmental and social issues are interlinked.

We are delighted that so many of you are getting into the book exchange spirit with our recycled readers sending us a wonderfully eclectic array of books for other readers to sample, cherish and fall in love with.

From the tender and rich Small Island by Andrea Levy, via George R.R. Martin's immense fantasy series Game of Thrones right through to Kurt Vonnegut's wildly eccentric collection Breakfast for Champions, not to mention the gorgeously written Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides you have traded in a fantastic selection of reads recently. 

There are many a list that detail the best independent bookshops; the most beautiful bookshops; the coolest bookshops and even the greatest bookshops in the world, but here at Book Exchange HQ we are lovers of book exchanges, places where readers release their used books out into the wild to be picked up by others.  So we have decided to start a new compendium listing our top book exchanges the world over.

We like to say thank you to customers who keep coming back to us so for every 10 books you buy or exchange you will receive a free book.  And to make sure you get the free book of your choice we'll simply add £2.50 to your online account which you can spend on any book in store.

Since my last update I have had to take a few steps back to review all things book exchange, the biggest thing being the unexpected price increases that have recently been imposed on us by the Royal Mail.  Although I can understand the theory behind their decision; increases of some postal charges by 20% have impacted heavily on our business model and as such I have had to remodel our pricing structure.  To accommodate these changes we now need to be a little more traditional and separate the postage costs out at the shopping basket.