Too Lazy To Go To A Library? Rent Books Netflix Style!

BookSwim aims to do for the book market what Netfilx has done for DVDs.  For $19.98 a month you can rent up to three books at a time, free shipping to and back.  Why not just go to a library?

The company’s answer includes these main points: no late fees, 24-hour browsing, a wider selection, less waiting for popular titles, and no need to leave home.

I’m not persuaded by all of these reasons. I don’t believe BookSwim’s selection is as wide as a major city library. The Martin Luther King Jr. Library here in San Jose claims a collection of over 1.5 million items. And its catalog can be searched online, like most libraries these days. BookSwim’s selling points probably mean more to customers who don’t have a big library nearby.

I suspect the waiting-list and convenience issues will favor one side or the other, depending on the customer and the books they’re reading.

The page also says this about BookSwim’s selection: “Can’t find a book on BookSwim.com? Let us know and we’ll buy it!”

The concept is interesting but I wonder whether or not it’ll really take off.  Most avid readers like to keep their books and build an impressive library (like me) and usually know where to find deals on their books that make the $20 price point not such a great deal, especially when you can find a lot of books used through Ebay or Amazon or just trade for them through services like PaperBack Swap.

But you may be hard pressed to find the newest releases cheaply, so the immedeate satisfaction of having a new book or best seller for a few days for a quarter of the cover price does have its appeal.