Share your books

How does peer-to-peer apply to physical objects? John Buckman, who runs the premiere record label Magnatune has launched BookMooch, a place where you can share your used books with other people all over the world.

The idea is simple: you type in the books you want to share. People can then ask for a particular book, and when you mail that book to them, you earn points, which you can then redeem by asking books from others. They also keep a "reputation" score, just like eBay, to weed out the fraudsters. You can even donate your points to charity!

Our goal is to make more use out of all books, to help keep books from becoming unavailable. The worst thing that can happen to a book is for no-one to be able to read it.

I like these kinds of ideas a lot. I am probably a bit too lazy to participate, but I love books, and I certainly agree with the sentiment above.

(Via Joi.)




Comments

A nice idea, but seems a bit complicated to me. Personally the BookCrossing concept (http://www.bookcrossing.com/) is more appealing.

--Nikke, 07-Aug-2006


Well, it's a different philosophy. This is more like a distributed library system than the "abandon your book randomly" -attitude of BookCrossing...

--JanneJalkanen, 07-Aug-2006


BTW, this is just a test comment.

--JanneJalkanen, 08-Aug-2006


Surely P2P booksharing would mean that people send you individual pages for the book you want?

--kolibri, 08-Aug-2006


Funny, but no. The fact that most p2p programs split the files into smaller chunks has nothing to do with p2p as such; it's just an optimization suitable for digital files.

--JanneJalkanen, 09-Aug-2006


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