Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I was browsing this list of books that Joel Spolsky recommends for any programmer.  Its a pretty extensive list, covering different areas of software development.  As I read the summary for the books I found myself wanting to go to amazon and buy them all, they sound really interesting and useful.  Now, buying a dozen books is going to cost quite a bit of money, which I’m not going to spend.  Its also difficult to find these books at the library, at least the times that I’ve looked, so I can’t go borrow them from my library.  But I bet if I were to post a title of the book on my blog, I could find many people who own that particular book.

I think it would be sweet if we could have some sort of P2P network for sharing books with each other.  Virtually any book that I would want to read is owned by some other blogger.  We could maintain lists of what books we own, and if someone wanted to borrow a book, they could just search for a blogger with it, request it from them, read it, and send it back.

There are a few hurdles that I see here:

• Cost, sending these books isn’t free, so the person requesting the book would have to PayPal the person some shipping money.  This problem is amplified by the potential international shipping costs, if Geoff wants to borrow one of my books, its going to cost a pretty penny.
• Trust, you need to have a trustworthy network of people so that nobody gets screwed and doesn’t get their book back. To this end I think you could have a rating system like eBay has so that users are rewarded for positive transactions, and abusers are marked as such.
• Reference, a lot of times you read a book, and then you keep it around for reference material later on. Obviously if we’re reading the books, and then sending them back, we can’t hold on to them for reference.
• Time, there would need to be a set of guidelines for how long someone can have the book for, I wouldn’t want to lend my books out for a year at a time.
• Laziness, when someone requests your book, you would have to package it up and go to the post office, or arrange for the book to be picked up, kind of a big favor for someone you potentially don’t know.

I think the only major obstacle is the first one, cost.  I think that if you start with a small group, say the codebetter.com bloggers, we wouldn’t have an issue with trust or time, as I don’t think there is a dishonest or disrespectful one among us.  If there was some way to streamline the shipping of the books, and make it reasonably priced, I think this would work out really well, especially for a site like ours where we encourage education and professional development (don’t we?).  This would be just another way to build relationships and a community.