I made brief mention of a technical book exchange in a previous post. I have had several inquiries in comments, email, and Twitter asking for more details on this idea. To be clear, this does not yet exist, but what about it?
Would you be interested in a technical book exchange?
How might it work?
What kind of system, both physical and electronic, would help manage the process?
In my mind, a model wherein everyone opens up their technical bookshelf and sends things around to each other in the mail makes sense. The model also comes with obvious risks.
I am very interested to hear your ideas. Perhaps we can come up with a simple and effective model that people would actually be interested in.
Have you checked bookmooch.com? It works very well, I’ve exchanged 50 books there.
One problem with technical books is the weight, though. They are usually “bricks”. Another problem is that with tech books the demand tend to be too biased towards “hot” titles (regular books are more evenly spread, since a good sci-fi book from 1998 is still a good book in 2009).
STTCPW: forum software where people can create “want to trade” threads.
Sure – a custom website where users create lists of books they have and books they want and potential trades are made automatically, blah blah blah – that would be more fun to create. But you could have the forum created in a few minutes and 10 minutes later I could have my “want/have” threads created and people could be contacting me.
If it were me I would only create 4 rules:
1) No posting books for sale (or at least have the “for sale” and “for trade” threads into separate forums).
2) Each user can only have one “for trade” thread going at a time.
3) FS/FT threads expire after 30 days (and you can only bump your thread once per day)
4) No discussing deals gone bad
These are the basic rules for a guitar gear sale/trade site I frequent and they work well.
Beyond that things will become self policing. A little trust goes a long way.
I’m happy to host if that’s an issue.
Robert.
You could look at paperbackswap.com for inspiration. I know my wife has used that site to trade *hundreds* of books.