Other schools and universities may want to duplicate this service.
If you are a student on a campus which has this kind of service, please post a comment about it on this web site.
I and other students at San Francisco State University (SFSU) can borrow some under-graduate college textbooks and some required books for a class for free from the "ASI Project" at SFSU, as those books are available in their inventory. There are several 1000 of these books in the inventory, not nearly enough to help even 5% of the 60,000 or more students who use the SFSU main campus daily.
However we who have received one of them can borrow them and use them for the entire semester. We promise not to "mess them up" with highlighting or bend or rip pages or covers. If we "damage the book" we have to pay for a replacement book. We have to return our borrowed books at the end of the semester. At that time the students who run the operation log them back into "stock" so they can be checked-out again the next semester and given to other SFSU students who request to use them.
Requests for free used books are honored on a first-come first-serve basis, in part by the borrower's degree of economic hardship including having a disability, and by the number of copies of the book which have been donated to the ASI Project inventory of used books.
Donated used books come from some students who give their books away at the end of a semester, from some faculty members who have "last edition" of evaluation copy of a textbook they required for a class, and from some departments that do the same. The books come ad-hoc, as each source can afford to give one away.
