There often comes a point where buying the volume of books you're reading just isn't either practical to afford or store. A solution to the latter is to give them away, the former to borrow from one another.

This site will help with both those solutions by allowing folks to browse each other's book collections and either trade with, or kindly relieve the other of their respective literature. Other fun ideas to spin out from this are group meets, networking, recommendation, reviews, and so on.

Watch this space

This is a back-burner project - I have a lot else on. I'm doing my best though...

Credits

I've wanted to do this for years. As my tastes for specialist esoterica (computers, proteins, people, brains, ...) have developed so has the brutal assault against my wallet. Since I can't sit still in one country for long hauling these tomes around is becoming a problem too.

Several things recently have helped put this plan into action: being able to generate some income through referrals; being able to programmatically query Amazon using their XML Web Services; acquiring a second hand barcode scanner; and encouragement from other people. In particular, Oli Barrett started his own library stimulating some community discussion on the subject at Ecademy, and Stephan Samson has been especially excited about it – even written up some ideas for a whole book swap site.