A well reasoned and researched defense of the new collaborative economy. Also a well-laid argument against traditional consumption economy models. ( )

This is an extremely important book that I urge you to read.
It’s clear to most of us that the way we live in the West is unsustainable. The amount we consume in order to satisfy our urge to own, is outstripping the Earth’s resources at an alarming rate. The extent of this excess is detailed in the opening chapters with much of the focus on the excesses of the people of the USA, but sadly we in the UK and the rest of the developed world appear intent on catching up.

We’ve been trained to desire possessions and to crave the new and the latest versions. It’s the basis of our economic model and what we call success, but it’s simply unsustainable. For example the size of the average US home has more than doubled in the last 50 years whilst family size has reduced yet since the first self-storage facility opened in 1964 the US personal storage business has grown to a $22 billion business with over 53,000 facilities and a total of 2.35 billion square feet of storage.
The book is littered with startling examples:- For example the average mobile phone has a life of 18 months; 30 million phones are sold in the UK annually to a population of 60 million and over 11 billion phones have been built for a world population of 6 billion.

Elsewhere in the home it’s disconcerting to find that a typical domestic electric drill is used for between 6 and 13 minutes during its entire lifetime – most people want the hole, not the drill.

Something has to change and the rest of the book outlines what could and what is happening to foster collaboration and sharing ranging from models similar to the traditional ‘book library’ through more radical approaches such as ‘couch surfing’ where people eschew hotels and instead sleep on the couches of locals. There are many examples of inadvertent ‘green processes’ such as ebay, where items are given a new life instead of being discarded and web sites such as Zilok, Bartervard, Zopa, Freecycle, u-exchange, SWAP etc.

The final section looks at the impact of collaborative use, for example where design for longevity and sustainability become increasingly important and manufacturers become ‘lifecycle providers’ rather than product producers.

In what for many is a depressing time where our actions seem woefully disconnected from the reality of their consequences, this book offers hope. It doesn’t have all the answers, but read it and maybe you can become part of them.
Highly recommended. ( )

(by Sylvia): Collaborative Consumption is a movement away from the assumption that you must own a thing to own its service, and that you must buy a thing to have access to it. The average American car sits still for 23 out of every 24 hours. What if someone else could drive it and return it before you needed it again? Is it the car you need, or just the ability to get somewhere? With the rise of such services as Netflix and RedBox, we are recognizing that it's not the DVD we want, but the movie it contains. This book is a tour of some of the great examples of collaborative consumption, and a treatise on why this movement may just be what our planet, relationships, budgets, and communities need.

The associated website is http://collaborativeconsumption.com/
An awesome infographic can be found at: http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/insider-blog/assets/Collaborative%20Home...

An associated TED talk can be found at: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_cons...

A look at the economics and social consequences of sharing. ( )

As another reviewer has already said, this could have been good as an article but just didn't seem to flesh out as a whole book. The authors discuss the idea of collaborative consumption - both 'new' ways of obtaining goods and of sharing them - as though this is something that has really only developed on and because of the internet. What is more, their view of the internet is definitely seen through rose-tinted glasses, with the idea that it really is just one big sharing, caring network.

Interestingly, many of the examples given in this book (and various examples are dragged out again and again) don't seem to be particularly revolutionary, or even collaborative. Ebay is mentioned more than once as being a platform for 'collaborative consumption', when really it is just people selling stuff, and recently not even people flogging off stuff they don't want any more, but shops and commercial entities. So how this is some new 'collaborative consumption' enterprise and something like Amazon is not is a bit beyond me. While there are quite a few examples of more radical, collaborative enterprises mentioned on this book (though many of them don't seem to be doing much, or have developed a lot), much of what is mentioned as new is really just old ideas, many of them straight out commercial enterprises. Even the main example at the beginning of the book - Air BnB, where people register their spare room on the internet as being for let for holiday makers - is nothing particularly new, and how is this some great new system for those 'against the excesses and waste of consumer society ... a way out' as the blurb on the back of the book says? It is still people selling something and others paying for it, only now it is much less regulated, and it is on the internet. So what? (Couchsurfing, which gets a bit of a mention in the book, is perhaps a better example as it is not about charging for something, but it is obviously not quite as sexy as Air BnB).

I started this book excited that there was something that had supposedly been written about more collaborative, community means of achieving things without being part of the extractive capitalist system, but by the end I was flicking through to see if the authors actually had anything new to say. They didn't. This book seems to be all hype and very little change. ( )