Re-inventing the wheel

I\’ve been meaning to post this story for a while as it annoyed me so much when I first read it, I even contemplated writing a letter to the editor. In this recent story, The Stanford Daily describes Bookshare, an initiative set up by students last year. The students relate how they came up with the idea;
\”[we] were sitting in our room, staring at our full bookshelves and feeling depressed over the amount of money we had spent on textbooks for one quarter\”
So, they came up with a radical solution: create an alternative to buying books at the campus bookstore by setting up an online database of books available for students to loan out to one another for a fixed period of time.
Apparently other University campuses are interested in the system, which is described as being \”based on Napster\”. The system is being expanded to Movieshare, Gameshare and CDshare. Sound familiar? Can anyone say \”library\”? Argh! Anyone else feeling this frustration? Don\’t they realise what libraries are there for?