I am aware of book swapping sites such as paperbackswap, where you get tokens for sending books, and spend tokens to receive them. This incentive scheme encourages people to put up their least valuable, oldest, blandest books.
I have a lot of books that I’ve purchased recently, before I read them they were each worth $20-30 to me (or whatever I bought them for). Now, after reading them, they are worth effectively $0 to me. The inverse of this obviously exists for others that have read different books than me. This alignment of coincidence of wants should be solved technologically!
I envision a site where a user posts a photo of their book shelf / stack (or a list of titles they want to trade), along with a wishlist of books they want to read. Another user browsing the site will clue-in to the other users with whom they share similar interests. They can then negotiate in private messaging which books they’d like to trade. Allowing users to find others that share interests with them would greatly improve the incentive scheme. If I want to read about ancient history, there is a great inefficiency in trading with someone who prefers science fiction.
This would create multiple efficiencies over centralized indirect exchange sites:
1. instead of shipping out 1 book at a time, two readers of similar interests might trade 5-10 books at a time (5-10 fold improvement).
2. instead of both shipping to / from a central location, users ship directly to each other (2-fold improvment).
Trust could be enforced through a relatively simple security deposit / escrow system (e.g. bisq).
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Does this or something similar exist?
by cryptokid2140