Libraries of Things as a new form of sharing. Pushing the Sharing Economy

Abstract

Although the willingness to share is huge, sharing is rarely applied in everyday life, because many current Sharing Economy offers are not practicable. This paper asks what contributions an innovative Sharing Service–a library not simply lending books but a wider range of items–can make to close the gap between willingness to share and practice. Most of these innovative libraries were founded in the last few years, but many still fail to overcome the identified gap. As global environmental problems demand a change of consumer behaviour to enable human actions within planetary boundaries, bridging the gap could have a huge impact. Libraries of Things could reduce the average resource and energy consumption of users, maintaining quality of life. This paper analyses existing Libraries of Things and Tool Libraries. The outcome is assessed against empirically proven user expectations to detect the discrepancies between supply and demand of current offers commonly available.