Book Swapping Business Idea

There are a couple of Netflix like services for books out there. Basically you get 3 (or 4 or 5) books at a time, as you read them and send them back more books will automatically be sent to you. Bookswim.com and booksfree.com (contrary to the name, the books are NOT free). are two examples.

The thing that makes these services difficult is that warehousing and shipping and handling books costs more than similar work with CDs. Wouldn't it be more efficient to ship the book from one consumer directly to another? Only one shipping charge, and no costs for handling or inventory storage.

I haven't decided on a specific model and I'm looking for input on what model would work best.

ASSUMPTIONS

1. The queue functionality is important. This is a good way to deal with titles that have limited availability. Also gives insight into a consumer's preferences. It serves as a reminder for the consumer of titles that they are interested in. They can add titles whenever they think of them , when it's convenient. They don't have to think about what they want "next", when they return one title.

2. Some people are collectors. I have friends that have hundreds of DVDs at home, so they can watch them over and over. They don't subscribe to Netflix. Likewise, people who want piles of books on their shelf would not be the target market for this service. Instead, we would go after the larger market of people who want to read them and get rid of them. In fact getting rid of them is a bonus, as they don't have to feel guilty about throwing them away or having to drive them over to a library (many of which has stopped accepting book donations any way).

3. For convenience, we would need to provide postage-paid mailers. Hopefully, the USPS allows prepaid postage at Media Mail rates.

4. If the consumer is responsible for shipping the stuff, how do you know they will do it? I think we would have to rely on the Honor System (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/07/the-honor-syste.html). Most people are honest! But people who ship quickly, will get higher priority on books in their queue.

POTENTIAL MODELS
A) List the books that you have available and the queue of books that you want. When a title you have appears on someone else's want list, we send you instructions to ship it to them. We then do the same for something that is on your want list. Charge per book sent to you? Or monthly subscription charge?

B) Forget trying to get consumers to list books they have. Instead, we seed the service by purchasing the books at the top of peoples' want list and sending them. Then we know what they have (what we've sent in the past) and can have them ship it the next time that book is on someone's list.

C) Similar to B, but instead seeding the service by buying books through traditional channels, we search on half.com, bookcrossing.com and similar services. We have those people send the book to our customer. At the same time, we try to get the Half or BookCrossing member to join our service.