WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers (Collins, £12.99)

Airbnb.com is a website — “a diverse marketplace for space” — which took its name from the idea that people could let out odd spaces in their homes for an airbed with breakfast.

It’s more elaborate than that now, but is quoted here as the first example of an exploration of the balance point between owning and sharing. Airbnb.com is worldwide and growing fast, with more than 1,000 registered users in the UK, and you can rent unusual accommodation in hundreds of locations. With 10,000 trips to date, there have been no reports of theft from any homes.

There are many more websites like Airbnb; examples of what the authors call “collaborative consumption”. This book examines the ways that this socioeconomic groundswell is changing how we live.

It’s not just about new websites, although there is a handy list of them at the back. It is about new behaviours, personal stories, social theories, business examples, and a refreshing of older “stigmatised” notions, such as co-operatives, collectives and communes. They explore four underlying principles: critical mass; idling capacity, belief in the commons and trust between strangers. Examples of critical mass include Barclays Cycle Hire in London and a tool-lending library in Santa Rosa. There’s idling capacity in any house: the average electric drill is only used for about 13 minutes of its life; most cars are used for less than an hour a day; and that spare bedroom is rarely occupied.

Of the stuff we own, 80 per cent is used less than once a month, but we could with a little ingenuity share most of it. Belief in the commons means sharing so that every individual who joins a collaborative scheme adds value for another. Most forms of collaborative consumption require us to trust strangers, and well thought-out systems do enable the weeding out of free riders and abusers. The book teems with examples of the benefit of usage over ownership: toy libraries, DVD rental, car and land sharing, fashion rental, carpet and solar-panel borrowing, and many more.

Collaborative consumption creates a different mind-set, a way out of the excesses and waste of our consumer society.