avinash.vora ★

A new service, BookSwim (via Lifehacker), seems to be trying to cash in on the incredible idea NetFlix has going for them. Here’s their marketing copy direct from their front page:

Online Book Rental Library. Stop buying books when you can borrow new releases and classics with free shipping! Netflix has popularized online DVD Rental. We`re doing it for books! BookSwim is the first online BOOK RENTAL LIBRARY CLUB lending you paperbacks and hardcovers directly to your house WITHOUT THE NEED TO PURCHASE! Whether it’s New Releases, Bestsellers, or Classics, we’ve got 150,000 titles to choose from, with FREE SHIPPING BOTH WAYS! Read your books as long as you want. — no late fees! Even choose to purchase and keep the titles you love!

Let’s skip past the pretty miserable aesthetics on the website, the fact that it is labeled “beta” (go ahead, punch in your credit card details), the unnecessary capitalization and the MySQL error dumps and focus on the phrase “the best way to rent books”.

Their pricing scheme works out to $20/month for 3 books at a time up to $36/month for 11 books at a time. Here’s a few issues with that:

• A standard paperback, say, Dune, costs $8. 3 of those and we’re just about reaching free shipping on Amazon. And I get to keep the books.
• For $36 I can get in about 4, maybe 5 books. Remember, that is for new books—if I head to Amazon marketplace I could pick up used books for a few dollars less. The books from BookSwim aren’t going to be brand new. I could potentially get 8 or 9 used books for $36. And keep them.
• 11 books at a time sounds like a great deal, but getting through 11 standard books is no easy feat in 30 days. To really make that worth it, you’ve got to use it twice: get 22 books in one month. That’s almost a book a day.
• The library is free, and paid for by your taxes. Sure, it doesn’t deliver to your door, but there is no waiting time, and you can flip through your book before you take it out.

Using the NetFlix model on books isn’t the smartest idea because, as much as Amazon makes it seem so, books and DVDs are perceived completely differently in the mind of the customer. There is no cheaper or easier way to get a movie than to use NetFlix—every rental store I have been to charges too much and gives you a pitiful amount of time to keep the DVD. Even the university DVD library (which, where I go, is free) has a small library and extremely harsh late fees.

The situation with books are completely different. In my experience, people would much rather lend out a book than a DVD—I know several people who happily give away their books. Scratch that, thousands. Books are also cheap enough that many people have more books in their media library than movies.

Of course I could be wrong. I’ve known to have made a mistake in judgment two or three times in the past. I just don’t think that following the business model of a market that is deceptively different to yours is the best course of action. For this service to succeed (and to get to a place where I would use it), it should be about $5 a month for say 2 books at a time. I doubt that’s a feasible cost for BookSwim, but then from my point of view, I don’t think the current cost is feasible either.

Also, I get the feeling that I’ve seen their favicon somewhere else. Any ideas?

Update: I forgot to mention, but I haven’t delved into their processing time. I have never used NetFlix, but I would guess that their processing time is the same if you live geographically close to their distribution centers. I assume BookSwim has far less distribution centers than NetFlix, if in fact that number is more than 1. If you live on the other side of the country, you could spend more time waiting for a book than reading it. In hindsight, this would probably be the biggest turn off from the service for me (had I seriously considered it).