By Jessica Booth

The end of the semester is here, which means it’s almost time to sell back all of the books you bought back in January. In other words, waiting in line for a half hour only to get back less than half of what you spent on textbooks you might have hardly used. Or even worse, waiting only to find out that they’re not taking back any of your books.

Or, you could go to Swaptree.com, create an account in about a minute and trade that boring textbook for the new DVD you wanted. Not only will you be saving time and money and getting something good out of something you no longer wanted, but you’ll also be recycling items that you have no use for.

Swaptree.com was launched in July 2007, and since its start, it has grown in popularity. The site prides itself on allowing users to save money because all you have to pay for is shipping charges. You can trade your old books, DVDs, CDs and video games for something new, and it will probably only cost you a few dollars. Users love it because it allows them to get rid of the items they no longer want while getting something back in return.

“Getting rid of the stuff you’re not going to use and recycling these things is great for a college student on a budget,” says marking associate Jack O’Hurley.

The site was thought of by Greg Boesel and Mark Hexmar in 2004. The two were in graduate school together and spent most of their time trading books back and forth. Since they had previously launched a successful company, they figured they could do another one.

“They thought, why are there 10 million copies of “The DaVinci Code” out there when we could probably do with 1 million copies if everyone traded them when they were done?” says O’Hurley. “With e-commercing and bartering seeing an uptake right now, they kind of considered it a perfect storm of events.”

Swaptree.com couldn’t have come at a better time. With this dragging economy, people will do almost anything to save money. At the same time, the Internet has never been more popular, and the majority of people are buying items online for discount prices on sites such as eBay. Also, doing anything to help the environment is a huge trend right now and Swaptree.com tries to always partner with green initiatives and promotes the idea of a greener world by urging people to recycle.

“A lot more people are becoming comfortable with online transactions, and this kind of steps into another realm,” says O’Hurley. “We provide an easy way of consumer-to-consumer commerce.”

Some of these websites can seem confusing, but Swaptree.com is easy to navigate and boasts that it only takes eight seconds for a new user to sign up. There is a demo video for any new user to watch that is easy to understand and answers most questions.

Once you sign up, all you have to do is list the items that you want to trade. After you’ve done that, the site will get together a list of all of the items that you can get for your item. Since there are over 2 million items up for trade right now, there are plenty of options to choose from. One of the advantages is that you don’t have to trade a book for a book or a CD for a CD. You can do cross-media trading and get anything you want.

After you’ve picked the item you get, you can check out the other person’s information to make sure everything will be safe.

“We’ve modeled it after the eBay trust model, so all users have a different rating,” says O’Hurley. “There’s a huge community feel around it. While there are some other sites out there that you’re not really sure who you’re trading with, we try to make that information as transparent as possible.”

Not only can you see the person’s rating, but you can also check out their feedback and information on past trades they’ve done.

If safety and security are concerns, you shouldn’t be worried. “We do a couple of thousand trades a day, and the incident rate is less than one half of 1 percent a day,” says O’Hurley. Whenever there is a problem, the site has a formal process to try to get everything worked out positively.

Currently, around 400,000 people are using of Swaptree. In the past six to eight months, the site has doubled in size, probably due to the economy.

“Home entertainment has become more popular,” says O’Hurley, noting that the use of sites such as Netflix.com has also increased.

“We definitely want to grow the volume of college users, get more awareness on the college community and get more textbooks on the site,” says O’Hurley. “So when you’re walking into the bookstore, instead of spending $120 on a biology book, you can go back to your room and buy it for only the cost of shipping.”

The site recently launched an Earth Day project in which they partnered with the Nature Conservancy to start the reforestation of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. For every trade they got that day, they would give one dollar to the Conservancy. The Conservancy would, in return, plant one tree in the forest for each dollar. On Earth Day, they had several thousand trades and successfully raised a good amount of money.

“We try to partner with as many green initiatives as possible,” says O’Hurley. “We’re going to be reaching out to promote to college students on campus who are trying to save a pretty penny and help out the environment at the same time. There’s definitely synergy between what we’re trying to do and any green organization as well. I think having those kinds of incentives is just an added value to the site. It makes people feel better about what their doing.”

So think twice the next time you’re about to buy an over-priced textbook at the bookstore. Plus, with each new member comes a new possibility. O’Hurley says, “The more people know about it, the better amount of items on the site to trade.”