BookMooch, Buckman’s 20-month-old service that lets people trade their used books for the cost of postage, is making a small impression on a giant online retailer, Amazon.com. Even though BookMooch is free to members, the site generates an estimated half-million dollars in annual book sales for Amazon because of a browser plug-in called the Moochbar, which matches members’ book wish lists to Amazon’s retail inventory. For every 25 books swapped on BookMooch, at least one person buys a new book on Amazon through the Moochbar. BookMooch collects 8.34 percent on each of those Amazon sales.

“We’re making money by accident,” said Buckman, who spoke recently at a technology luncheon near his home in Berkeley, Calif.

Apart from still-negligible sales, what should be more of a wake-up call to the book industry is how the site is tapping into the so-called long tail of book retail with a social, free service. The long tail, as the theory goes, accounts for as much as 60 percent of the goods sold in an industry, or all those unpopular works that find a home with only a few. It’s said that the lion’s share of Amazon’s book sales come from works that have a low sales ranking.

Even if he doesn’t strike it rich with BookMooch, Buckman may do something more valuable…like prove there’s another way to tap into the book business.

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