Mobile app sugestion: selling / buying books

I am using librarything service for many years and I am quite happy with the web app. Yet I am missing a very important feature in the Android app: acquiring books between members.

I am having approx 1000 books and always looking foward to make new purchases to complete a collection, or to start (reading) a new one.

Czechia is a country of book lovers, with large network of public libraries, even in the smallest towns. Yet still, a "find / sell a book" is very popular, so probably adding a place to swap/offer book for sale (and a comission for you) might be good to support your business case at LibraryThing. A very popular service here in Czechia is TrhKnih.cz or reknihy.cz, taking the advantage of a vast barcode/book DB to find and buy/sell book. Also the TrhKnih.cz has a very good "proof of purchase" to validate a sale has been done via codes generated during the book handover provided to both parties, entered when books are provided by selling to purchasing party, while purchasing party is paying book on TrhKnih account, and after the prrof of handover sent to the seller.

Please consider this, I guess I am not the only one looking for such feature.

I will be happy to provide you with more details as I would love to see your service becoming more user friendly to the needs of the book-lovers.

Thank you for taking this improvement into consideration.

So what you need is access to the Librarything Local in the app so you can go to all the various book places near you?
I don't want the app to become a sales platform, because then authors will try to ruin it like they ruined GoodReads and Amazon.

I agree with gourmet. LT would be 10x more useful if you could sell and buy from the app. I imagine, the developers will have considered this and may have not gone that route because of the considerable work and competition.

As far as competition goes, however, I feel there is a large gap in the market for an international person-to-person marketplace, specifically for books, combined with inventory builder for collectors. So bibliophiles can buy, sell and trade directly from their collections. Currently no such thing exists. Amazing, 30 years into the development of the internet. Music has discogs, and I can attest that when it works it is brilliant. Clothes has Vinted and it works well from what I've heard for buyers and sellers, though it's just a marketplace rather than an inventory builder for collectors. For books however there is no such single platform. Despite the fact that book readers often give and receive books. Amazon and Ebay now sell too much other stuff to cater to book collectors specifically. Also, for some us it is nigh on impossible to use their selling marketplaces because of international restrictions. Abebooks and similar cater to professionals only. Goodreads just link to Amazon. Some countries do have book-only marketplaces, but they generally cater to professional sellers. Or are generalist sites full of rubbish.

The difficulty lies in the execution. It would take considerable investment to build a marketplace and I guess the first thing VCs will think of is competition from Amazon, Ebay, Rakuten, Etsy et al. Once built, you have to ensure a safe experience for both buyer and seller, with safe payment, order tracking, scammer detection, feedback ratings etc. Discogs has done this well generally. Though they have had their ups and downs.

Just yesterday I saw a huge pile of boxes of mostly kids books in great condition left out near the recycling bins. If only there was a marketplace.

Most of us do not want to sell our books, and it is against the terms of service to use the site commercially. There are plenty of other places to buy and sell books.

Sounds like >1 gourmet77: and >3 gabelib: should get together and build what they want. Because I believe here is for tracking and collecting but no commercial activity.

Oh, and the pile of books by the bins? Scoop them up, take them to the Friends of the Library for a book sale. Place them in a little free library.
Use Bookcrossing to spread them around for free. I think PaperbackSwap is still in existence for free book sharing. (In fact, I think we have some of the free book swap sites still linked in the Your Library tab. I just don't use them.)

>5 gilroy: But please not connected to LT. I really don't want people contacting me, trying to buy my books.

Never mind the difficulties in mailing books internationally, keeping scammers out, ...

>6 MarthaJeanne: Oh, definitely not. But has been possible for people wanting to sell books (whether individuals or book sellers) to put a link to their own LT collection on their own sites / pages for a very long time.

>7 Nicole_VanK: Hard to stop that, but I have seen staff tell people to get all references to selling out of their profiles and messages.

>6 MarthaJeanne: When I say build it, I mean as a completely different app unrelated to LT in any way, shape, or form.