1. You want a book i'm offering and /msg me
2. I tell you where to send postage and your address
3. You send postage and your address
4. I use your postage and send the book to your address
5. What logistics?

Update: This is merely an example. The reason for suggesting that each lender be their own librarian is so that some central authority doesn't have to impose inflexible rules, and so every contingency can be met on a case-by-case basis by the parties involved.

Ah, but how do I know what books you're offering?

Sure, you could put a section into your personal page, but in order to track down a book, a prospective user would need to look up everyones' personal page. Not very easy, and very demoralising since the vast majority of monks are not offering books yet.

So does the Monastery set up a virtual library catalogue where interested monks register what they're offering? Actually this could be an interesting idea with possibilities beyond just books...

A jcwren tag would be perfect for this task...
(like location, birthday...)

Few tags would do fine:
Book-Offered
Book-Needed

His page whould be a perfect place to look for available/needed books.

UPDATE : I must say why I prefer this way, rather than SuperSearch.

The stats page allow us, by it centralized stat gathering a way to got global stats about the way books move.
I mean with few property inside some tags,
(namely: title of the book, people who gave/received it, date it was given/received)
we could be able to know how many times a book was given, who get/gives the books, and a lot weird/useless stats...
(The average time a book stay in someone hands ?)
(Most asked book ?)

As i said, we could use Super Search as the card catalog (homenodes are the cards).

(elaborate example deleted)

Update: arhuman's idea would work except there would be lag because homenode changes are instant whereas stats are not. Tyke's concern with the obscurity problem could be addressed by adding some mention of it to one of the site FAQs, and book-related form elements in super search.

ps - jcwren says homenode tags update every day at 3:00AM EST/EDT
pss - homenode tags can now be scanned immediately


Update: Virtual Distributed Library Online!

If the giver is willing to shell out for the first person (or gives it by hand) then there's an easier way... each pays the postage to the next in the line.

Quite frankly, how much would it cost to send the Camel book from Ghana to Outer Mongolia?