For years now, I have been trying to clean out the bedroom in my parents’ house. I’ve managed to give away, throw away or recycle most of the clothing, knick-knacks and junk, but two large bookcases remain.
For biblophiles, books are hard to discard.
Maybe that’s OK. Maybe even green minimalists should have libraries.
But on the other hand, we know that the production of any object, including a book, involves pollution and waste. Trees are (often) cut down. Paper is (often) bleached. Electricity is used to print and bind and distribute and sell.
And yet many books are read once or twice and then sit dusty for years until someone carts them off to a local library (where they’re probably pulped anyway since libraries have run out of space).
Wouldn’t it be better to have a shared-use model in the mode of Netflix?
You may not think of Netflix as a green company, but think of it this way. Let’s say that 100 people around America decide that they would like to watch The A-Team – Season 1 (just because it’s an awesome 80’s TV show) sometime in the next six months.
Without Netflix, these folks (many of them living in suburbia) either have to drive back and forth to the rental store or go out and buy the DVD. Let’s say that 2/3 of them only want to relive these A-Team memories once. After that, the DVD will languish unwatched and essentially useless.
But instead of 100 people buying 100 DVDs or making 200 trips to the rental store (once to pick up the DVD, once to return it), Netflix shares perhaps half a dozen of these DVDs among the whole pool of interested viewers. No one has to make a special car trip because the DVDs come with the regular mail. And far less energy goes into making a few DVDs that are widely shared.
This same shared-use model – people only paying to use something as needed – has cropped up recently in car-share and bike-share models like Zipcar and Velib.
So why not extend the idea to books? That’s the idea behind BookSwim – a book rental service that seems to work just the same as Netflix. You pay a set fee per month (starting at $14.99, ranging up to $34.99) to rent anywhere from 2 to 11 books at a time.
There are no late fees. You can keep books as long as you want, though obviously you’ll get better value for your money if you’re a fast reader. When you finish a couple of books, put them in the postage-paid envelope that BookSwim includes with each shipment and send the books back to the warehouse. Once your books are received, BookSwim will send out the next books you’ve stored in your ‘Pool’ (i.e. your list of requested books).
BookSwim’s database includes more than 200,000 paperback and hardcover titles. And if you request something that’s not in stock, they’ll go out and try to buy it for you.
Frankly, it seems like a great system, especially if you usually purchase a lot of books per month.
It seems to me there are only two drawbacks:
1) Public libraries offer the same shared-use service for books and most of them do it for free. But libraries don’t deliver. If you have to make a special trip or you live far away from the local library – or if you don’t own a car and have to lug books home on foot or by bike, you might not mind paying $15 or $20 per month to get a steady supply of books delivered to your mailbox.
2) The other drawback is that books don’t stay pristine very long. Two of the three books I received from BookSwim in my test order seemed a little ragged. People don’t generally care what a DVD looks like as long as it will play OK, but many of us want our books to look at least somewhat clean and presentable. In a library, you can make an on-the-spot judgment as to whether a book looks nice enough to take home, but with BookSwim, your choices arrive sight unseen. It may be a little expensive, but I think BookSwim will have to discard books that start looking shabby and buy replacement copies.
Oh and by the way, if you fall in love with any of the books that BookSwim sends you, you can always decide to keep the book and pay a discounted retail price.
Where to buy:
Sign up online at BookSwim’s website.
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