Firstly, thank you for reading! This is the very first in a newsletter series aiming to bring you two (maybe more, maybe sometimes fewer. I’ll try my best ok!) novel business ideas each week.

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Estimated reading time - 5 minutes

Background (The problem)

Part 1: The cost to universities of stocking a library

“Running a [university] library is also quite expensive – £3.8 million a year kind of expensive. That’s how much 138 universities in the UK spent on operating libraries in 2019/20.“

If you do the math, that adds up to a whopping £524.4 million spent on library services alone! That’s a serious chunk of change, and it’s only in the UK.

Libraries are one of those things that all universities must provide, and much of the cost will be buildings, maintenance, energy etc. But I would wager a large part of university library costs are having to continuously maintain a huge selection of (usually very expensive) academic books that may or may not be read by students. This often means the university buys a new publication, only for it to sit on the shelves and be read maybe once a year.

Part 2: Students must wait for a specific book to be back in stock or for another student to return it.

Because universities often only have one or two copies of each book it means that it’s not uncommon for a student to have to wait for the university to order a new copy (expensive for the uni) or wait until another student has first returned their copy in order to take out a book.

The idea:

What if all universities in an area were linked up where each universities’ library could borrow and then lend out each others copies?

Each university already has a database of all the books in their collection and which of those are currently being lent out to students. Every book owned by a library already has a unique bar-code.

The idea would be to offer a service to universities in a local area, let’s say London in this example. Offering them the cost-saving benefits of not having to keep in stock a bunch of very niche books, which are only very rarely taken out by students, with the added advantage of being able to offer their student copies which otherwise wouldn’t be available at their university but is sat at another universities library on the shelves.

So, what would be needed to make this work? Presumably, you would need to somehow get a feed from each universities’ database of books. This data would then need to be pulled at the end of every day to see which books each university had which weren’t on loan to students. At the end of the day, universities could submit to an online system which copies they would like to borrow, i.e. the books which their students requested a copy of but that they weren’t able to fulfil.

Once all the universities had submitted their requirements the system would match up which universities had an available copy of any of the books requested by other institutions.

Overnight a courier service would run a ‘milk-round’ between all the universities, picking up and dropping off which books they require to pull or push into the system.

Note for international readers: a milk round is where a ‘milkman’ would shuttle between houses in the early hours dropping off pints of milk to people’s doorsteps. They aren’t common anymore but they used to drive these adorable electric carts long before EV’s were even a thing.

Risks and Opportunities:

The Risks:

• Students not returning or losing their copies of books. Meaning one university would then have to re-reimburse another university for losing their property.

• Poor data feeds or inputting of requests by the universities. This would mean the couriers would spend time looking for copies that aren’t in stock. Or taking copies that are in stock but aren’t actually in demand from another universities’ library.

• Operational complexity of submitting requirements each day. This could be mitigated by automating this but universities might want to manage themselves which orders from other universities they think they want to fulfill.

• Legal implications of universities sharing copies of the books they own outside of their organisation. Although apparently “Interlibrary Copying” is a normal clause in Libraries contracts.

The Opportunities:

• Reduce the cost to the university of buying new, expensive and often little used books. This would also reduce the need for additional storage from universities.

• Increase the total number of different publications a university could offer to students.

• Increase ties to other universities and students. Providing goodwill from larger, more well-resourced universities to smaller ones who might not have the same quality of library resources.

Route to monetization:

The easiest way to monetize this idea would be to offer it as a form of subscription service to universities. However, this approach doesn’t incentivise universities to fully engage in the scheme. What’s stopping universities from taking more than they give?

You could alternatively, or in addition to subscription income, offer a credit system. Where you earn a credit for lending another university a book for a day, and spend credit requesting a certain number of ‘bookdays’.

Personally, I think a credit-based system would work quite nicely. You could even tailor it to offer universities an incentive to be the only one that carries a certain copy among all the participants. For example, offer a premium for rarer books and a discount for very common books. Using this credit system you could sell credit to entrants into the scheme, ensuring the balance of universities earning tokens is always lower than earning them, so there’s always a market-driven demand for new tokens.

Rating and review:

Potential Profitability (2/5)

Universities globally aren’t massive money makers (except private US colleges, we’re looking at you!) so you certainly wouldn’t be able to charge them an arm and a leg (that means “a lot”, again, for you international readers!).

Ease of implementation (3/5)

Relativity simple to tie into their existing databases, they must be maintained daily anyway. The tricky part is managing the physical movement of books between universities overnight to ensure the market ‘clears’

Scalability (2/5)

Within any given geographical area I think it would be easy to scale once you have a few universities on board. But it would be hard breaking into new markets as you’re then starting from zero and need to get a handful of organisations onboard all at once for them to be able to derive any value from it.

Overall score (2.33/5)

I hope you enjoyed reading this. If you have any questions, thoughts or even just want to say how stupid this idea is. You can

And if you steal this idea and turn it into a multi-million pound business…good on you!