For innovation to affect the lives of ordinary citizens the innovation must be in things ordinary people by. This causes a problem when those with a natural propensity to tinker to impress live in a different social class that the mass of their fellow citizens

The company has launched a new site called eBookToss.com, a virtual “e-book swap” that will facilitate the direct lending of e-books between consumers using the lending features enabled by platforms like the Kindle, and the Nook.

BookSwim CEO George Burke said:

“We’ve been talking to publishers about the concept of e-book rentals, but we don’t really know how possible that is. But, based on the announcement from Amazon in December [about enabling loans], we think we’ve found a model.”

eBookToss.com pools users to create an online list of lendable e-books and will facilitate free loans directly between users (contingent on features enabled by e-book providers, of course). The company is not the first to come up with the concept, though. A Web site called ebooklendinglibrary.com has been quietly operating a forum and a bulletin board for people to lend e-books, but it’s not very sophisticated and has generated only light traffic thus far. Probably because they’ve been trying to retrofit a message board into a swapping community, which is prone to problems.