So, last night – for reasons that will be explained soon – I decided to get rid of a few books. After shifting the majority to friends, I scanned the rest into Delicious Library, imported the list to the web and then linked the whole thing on Twitter to see if anyone wanted them.

And you know what? The response was pretty good, especially given that it was 1:30am. So good in fact that it gave me an idea – an idea which I’m sure isn’t totally original (in fact shortly after I’ve had it, @barrybell emailed me to suggest it as well) but which doesn’t seem to have been implemented yet.

In short, the idea is Twitter bookswap, a way to take advantage of the pretty decent trust levels on Twitter to swap unwanted books for new interesting reads. The mechanics are simple: if you have a book you want to swap, you simply Twitter ‘HAVE: “The Title Of The Book” [for: sort of thing you want in exchange]‘

So, for example: ‘HAVE: “The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson” WANT: an interesting business biog #bookswap’

Thanks to Twitter Search (or Tweetdeck, or whatever), it’s a simple matter to get a list of all the available swap books and, if you see one you want, to @reply to the person, suggesting something they might like in return. The actual swapping – probably by mail, but maybe in person – can be arranged by DM/email.

As I say, it’s dirt simple and entirely based on trust. Both parties have to trust each other to actually send the book, but if they don’t – well, the total cost of the loss is the postage on an unwanted book.

If the idea catches on then, in theory, it’s possible to do quite a lot to make it more user friendly. For example, using RSS (and the hashtag) someone could pretty easily put together an aggregation site that lists and sorts the swaps.

Thanks to the format – WANT, HAVE, specific books in double quotes, general desires not in quotes – it should be pretty easy to parse the data to make it searchable. In theory – if someone had the inclination – it should be possible to write a script that would actually suggest matches based on the data. There’s probably a way to filter by geographical location too…

…but I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, I just think the idea of #bookswap using the HAVE: and WANT: format might be cool.

What do you think?

Update: Such is the speed of Twitter, while I was drafting this post, Jon Markwell knocked together this concept for an aggregator. Freaking splendid. This thing could have legs.