Idea: a lending library with no returns. You borrow a book and it's yours until someone else wants it, at which point they have to physically locate you and ask. The catalogue doesn't track shelves. It tracks people.

I've been sketching this out and I think the core mechanic actually works better than a normal library for a specific class of book. The ones nobody reads twice go dormant in one person's flat forever, which is fine, that's what happened anyway. The ones people actually want start moving, and the movement itself becomes the record. You can see a book's history as a chain of hands rather than a stamp card.

Where I get stuck is the refusal case.

Somebody has to be allowed to say no. If they can't, it's not a loan, it's a queue with extra steps and someone will end up knocking on a stranger's door at eleven at night with a legitimate claim. But if they can say no freely, then popular books just calcify with whoever's most antisocial, and the whole thing collapses into a very inefficient bookshelf.

My current thought is that refusal costs you something — you can decline, but you go to the back of the queue for everything else. Which feels elegant for about ten seconds and then feels like I've invented a credit score for reading, and I hate that.

The other thing I can't resolve: what happens when someone dies. A normal library gets its book back. This one has a book sitting in an estate somewhere with a chain of custody that just stops. Do you write it off? Do you send someone? I genuinely don't know, and I suspect the answer determines whether the whole thing is a library or a slow-motion missing persons case.

Has anyone thought about the refusal economics properly? I think I'm missing something obvious about why this doesn't already exist in some form.