Are you interested in forming a Book-Lending Club?
Books are my weakness and the one thing I've continued to accumulate post-Mustachian conversion. I have a lot of how-to reference books that I consult occasionally (finance and investing, food fermentation, bicycle repair), so I don't want to get rid of them but I'd love if others could make use of them too. The Book-Lending Club would be region-specific for physical books, but some e-books can be lent too—I don't know all of the details of e.g. lending Kindle books, but if there's interest, we can figure it out!
(and yes, before some smartass comments on this, I do know what a library is! I use the local libraries all the time, but there are lots of books they don't have and I like to have some reference books on-hand.)What tools could we use to lend books to friends and neighbors? Something simple like a spreadsheet could work, but an app could provide additional features like rapid scanning in your book collection using ISBN barcodes and a mobile device, local book discovery by browsing others' libraries, and user reviews of book lenders and lendees (a sort of Web Of Trust system).
I use
Peerby to borrow and lend other things (scanners, keyboards, coffee grinders), but it doesn't have a way to explore the stuff (books, in this case) available to lend in your locale. I think local discovery is super-important.
Goodreads has mobile apps for scanning in books by ISBN barcode. You can create a publicly-shared 'lending' list. You can also create groups, and those groups can have their own lists, but it's unclear how exactly this would work for Book-Lending Club purposes.
Lenro is a purpose-built lending app. It allows you to add books one-at-a-time or import them from Goodreads, search for locally-available books, and browse other users' libraries. It has a following in India but almost no usage in the US. Importing from Goodreads adds ALL of your books to your profile (you can't choose to import form a single Goodreads 'shelf'), and though the import tool allows you to check which of your books are available to lend, it is impossible to hide a book from your profile without manually deleting it (which must then be repeated after every Goodreads import).
Barter.Li is a purpose-built lending app. It allows you to scan in books by ISBN barcode with a mobile device. I haven't used it and I don't know what other features it has.
LibraryThing allows tracking and lending. Collections of 200 books are free, more than that requires $10/year or $25/life membership. Haven't used it yet.
Libib has a 'Lending/Circulation System' and creates a public page to search all of the books available in the 'library network'; an organization account costs costs $5/month ($60/year) plus $1/month for additional 'library managers'. It can handle a 'network of libraries', which is basically what we want. This looks like it does exactly what I want it to do, if people are interested to buy in. Haven't used it yet.
Thoughts?