Inventaire - your friends and communities are your best library - Inventaire

inventaire *means "inventory" in French

Keep an inventory of your books

and of what can be done with them: "this book I can give, this book I can lend, this one is for sale..."
Share it with your friends and communities

Always dreamed of a collaborative library for your coworking / association / book club? Here it is!
Remember the books you lend or borrow

The books you lend might actually come back now!

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Some of the last books listed

Our mission & values

Empowering the Transition

This is an experiment about resources and capabilities. Given a resource you have or you look for, what are your possibilities? Make, give, get from a gift, lend, borrow, rent, buy, sell, upcycle, recycle... The goal of the Inventaire project is to map those possibilities, make alternatives visible. At the same time, this is about easing resources data transparency and openness, and the transmission of those data from the business to the customer.
Just Books. For now.

That's already a wide program isn't it? Let's start small: just mapping books in your network or nearby, available for giving, lending or selling. Peer to peer first, but integrating local libraries and local booksellers in the map as soon as possible.
Built on and for Open Knowledge

Information on resources should be free and open for citizens to be empowered in their daily choices. What if our daily interactions with resources, our transactions, were contributing to make everyone's knowledge on those resources grow? Inventaire is an experiment to make a step in this direction, starting by using Wikidata - the awesome public database gathering facts for Wikipedia - as a starting point to gather data on resources. All public data gathered in Inventaire will be published under an open licence.
Built on and in Open Source

Closed centralized systems grow dependency and lock-in the user in this system, while contributive, free and open knowledge needs trust to thrive. Trust comes from the possibility always opened to take what was built together and continue somewhere else, to explore new avenues or if the choices made here start to diverge from what the community expects. That's why Inventaire's code is a Free/Open software published under the AGPL3 licence. Today, the Inventaire experiment has a centralized technical architecture as decentralized architectures are hard to achieve: efforts are focused on bringing users value from open knowledge with as little pain as possible, but finding ways to overcome this centralization is part of the trip.
You own your data

For advanced users, you can already download your inventory data at any time. In the future, data should be interoperable and synchronizable with Personal Data Stores. In the current architecture, the user has to entrust Inventaire with all her data: those private data won't be shared with any third party

Wiki Roadmap Code Data Translation Blog FAQ Join the conversation

Totally randomly-selected messages from the people of the Internet

@inventaire_io is awesome! It's inter-library loan for personal libraries. Having fun loading my library now tweet by Chad Whitacre
Awesome new project building on top of Wikidata tweet by Wikidata
Reading @inventaire_io's roadmap: "Clues on the revenue model
- it won't be advertising
- it won't be selling users data"
I love you, guys ! tweet by PetiPandaRou
Contribute to @inventaire_io library development > How you can contribute. This project's doing everything right #opensource #openknowledge tweet by chroma_space
awesome collaborative library initiative h/t @inventaire_io tweet by Common Libraries
TO-DO : inviter tous mes potes sur @inventaire_io pour enfin savoir à qui j'ai emprunté ce super bouquin, pris en otage chez wam tweet by schanoird

Articles

Mapping resources using open knowledge: starting with books! – Maxime
Wikidata: The New Rosetta Stone – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona Lab
Ethical alternatives to Amazon Books, Kindle, Audible and Goodreads – switching.social
Entretien avec Maxime Lathuilière, fondateur d’Inventaire.io – Bibliobsession
12 initiatives – Une éphéméride solidaire et positive pour 2016 – Alternatives en marche
Les Modèles économiques ouverts – Les Bricodeurs

Interviews

Entretien avec Maxime Lathuilière – Sylvia Fredriksson
Libre à Vous : présentation d'inventaire.io – Libre à Vous
Radio Pluriel - Culture(s) Numérique(s) - n°4 - JDLL 2019 – Culture(s) Numérique(s)

Videos

Credits

Full-time team

Maxime Lathuilière (project, design, code)
Vincent Jumeaux (code, design, project)
you?

Contributors

All the wonderful people
improving the data, here or on Wikidata,
designing the project's future,
contributing code or technical insights,
enriching the Wiki,
helping translating
A big thank you to all of you who are making this project grow everyday!

How to contribute

Partners

Allmende (analytics)

Commons

Standing on the shoulders of libre and open source giants!

Beautiful Creative Commons pictures by: Brittany Stevens, Sarah Buckley, Luci Correia

Thanks!

Association

Wiki Roadmap Code Data Translation Blog FAQ Join the conversation

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