Lend2Friend is a concept in sharing books with friends. Based on the idea of sharing economy it’s a way to make our bookshelves accessible by those that might want to read and thus giving us also access to their book collections. Most of us buy books and receive books, but once they have been read they are latent on our bookshelves. This web application would make it possible to track the books we have, lend out the ones we aren’t reading and meet our friends in the spirit of sharing knowledge. It’s like a distributed library with the exception that you are sharing your books with the people you know. And most likely your circle has similar interests as you do so the amount of alluring reading increases. For example, a professional field specific title might not be present in the local library where the range of books has been targeted for an average Joe, but your friend in the same employment might hold it.
The idea came to me when I started to realize that I was running out of book space. My love for books has always been strong and the physical book has always outweighed the digital copy. The feeling of a good book in your hands, the smell of the pages and the magic of falling into one’s imagination is something to be kept alive. The printed book is so much more than the digital one which cannot be shared in the same way. Lend2Friend would try to keep the tradition of paper reading alive with the exchanging of these magical stories and volumes. It’s a digital platform that opens up a world of experiences in real life from a bookshelf, to the coffee shop and into the pages of bound books.
Project video: https://vimeo.com/157958619 Project website (an ongoing coding project): http://lauramk.me/booklend/ Project github: https://github.com/laurames/lend2Friend Project mockups: Attached in submission