Article by Emily Hendren
Twenty-first century American culture is all about bringing entertainment to the customer. Americans have been enjoying distance ordering and receiving for years; consumers can order dinner, buy a new coat, rent a movie, look for a job, look for love, look for a new house from the comfort of last month’s eBay purchase: a used La-Z-Boy recliner in "very good condition." With 2007'’s billionth Netflix delivery, consumers confirmed what researchers have known for years: Americans like convenience, and we like it in as many areas of our lives as possible.
Until recently, libraries have remained the go-to resource for book borrowing, excluding themselves from the wave of internet rental. As of March 2007, online company BookSwim.com has made it its goal to change the book rental process to one that fits its interpretation of the modern-day consumer's need of convenience. The book equivalent to Netflix, BookSwim offers search databases, various rental plans, product favorites, and online membership to track rentals and mailings. At first glance, BookSwim appears to be smart, varied in content, organized, and the all-important convenient, but beneath its cover, though not all bad, this new-wave online rental site falls short of the diversely-stocked and much-loved American public library.
How It Works
To get started online at BookSwim.com, a customer makes an account and chooses one of five rental plans. Unlike public library cards, which are free and include a vast expanse of library services such as author biographies, audio books, video and music rental, book reviews and critical essays, readings, conferences, and book clubs, not to mention face-to-face personal interaction, memberships to BookSwim.com don’t come cheap. The least expensive book rental plan costs $9.99/month (limited to one book/month) plus $3.99 for shipping and handling per book. BookSwim offers four other possible plans ranging from $23.95/month (three books at a time) to $59.95/month (eleven books at a time), all four of which include free shipping. Although sharing books rather than buying them ultimately conserves paper and reduces the cutting down of trees, it's hard to justify spending $13.98/month ($9.99 plus $3.99) when many paperback books retail for less than that, and the nation's 122,356 libraries with public access offer them for free.
Unlike its cousin, Netflix, BookSwim takes an average of "4-14 days" to ship books, which, if you have chosen the one book per month plan, can take up half the month’s reading time. A benefit of the BookSwim system is that the site allows the customer to mail back books while finishing one of them so as not to delay mailing time; if a customer has the three-books-at-a-time plan, she can mail back two books while finishing the third to receive two new books in a timely manner. Customers also have the option of keeping books they rented and liked enough to purchase. Additionally, BookSwim offers readers a self-to-text connection through having the books in-hand for reading, unlike another increasingly popular book-access tool, Amazon.com's Kindle. While both offer support to the environmental message of cutting the paper costs associated with printing books for purchase, technologically adept consumers might opt for the hand-held Kindle device that allows for the purchase of literature at a highly discounted rate in as little as sixty seconds for permanent use.
Search Options
To help a renter navigate searches, BookSwim offers twenty-one search banners including Cooking, Food & Wine; Gay and Lesbian; Health, Mind & Body; Romance; and Literature & Fiction. The links offer even more specific search possibilities; Literature & Fiction when clicked provides the option of sub-searching under Essays, World Literature, Genre Fiction, Classics, Erotica, Women’s Fiction, and Short Stories. The search banners and their sub-search options generally help narrow a hunt, however, some provide interesting, unexpected results and information. For example, clicking into Short Stories, a renter finds such collections as Sam Shepard’s Day out of Days: Stories, and John Updike's My Father’s Tears and Other Stories; however, she also finds Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies, two novels that certainly tell stories, but are in no way of the short story genre.
Additionally, when a renter searches under Literature & Fiction and sub-clicks Classics, BookSwim offers controversial results. In the Classics section J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein neighbor Malcolm Gladwell’s 2009 hit What the Dog Saw, Marian Keyes's "chick-lit" pillar Cracks in My Foundation, and Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—a novel BookSwim lists as solely authored by Jane Austen and describes as "one of the most universally loved and admired English novels, a country squire of no great means must marry off his five vivacious daughters. Jane Austen's art transformed this effervescent tale of rural romance into a witty, shrewdly observed satire of English country life." (Oh, and there are ZOMBIES!)
Textbooks
Along with everyday literature, BookSwim provides the opportunity for textbook rental through links that connect textbook-searchers to Chegg.com—a site that offers many textbooks, sometimes in multiple editions, for term-length rental. Renters see the textbook’s list price, the rental price (on average at least 50% of the list price), and then usually a discounted rental price (on average 10% lower than the rental price). For example, Chegg.com states Principles of Biochemistry (Lehninger 2008) retails for $218.75, rents for $53.49, and rents at a discount of $48.14. Taking into account that users choose a rental period of Semester, Quarter, or 60-Day Rental, with an option of "I need additional days," the price of renting seems relatively reasonable. However, a quick search on Half.com reveals that a customer could purchase the same book new for $79.99 and on Amazon.com used for $66.99, both of which offer information concerning supplemental materials such as CDs and online access codes—materials Chegg.com says it "does not guarantee." Though the textbook rental system seems affordable and practical for the modern learner, consumers using the internet know how to search for the best deal. Paying an additional eighteen dollars to purchase a book likely outweighs renting it temporarily—especially considering that consumers can sell back books online, oftentimes for profit.
Though the website boasts textbook rental and variety in multiple genres of literature, it does so with a narrow scope of the word "variety." One helpful highlight of the website is tags of the New York Times Bestsellers List, Oprah's Book Club List, and the Last Chance Bin—a list of books soon to be removed from the rental list. Along with these is a category of Members’ Top Authors—a category that offers insight to BookSwim's leading group of readers. Among the members' top ten authors are Nora Roberts, Nicholas Sparks, Stephanie Meyer, and Jodi Picoult, authors that add variety and spice to reading and modern literature, but also frequent the stereotypical women’s book club list. While the site claims to offer variety in material, many of the books undoubtedly target "Busy Moms"—a group the BookSwim team says the site is great for. Perhaps if the site included more traditionally- and/or canonically-deemed classics in its Literature & Fiction section, or a poetry section of any kind, readers would not be limited to the pop culture literature that reappears in practically every genre of text searched.
Drawbacks
Other tedious drawbacks include poor condition of books (dog-eared pages, tattered covers with stickers and markings), the inability to specify hard or soft cover when ordering, the inability to view more than four books per page when searching, the automatic renewal of the plan on the given credit card each month without notification, and the requirement of printing a return label in order to mail back books—a point the website fails to make before sign-up and one that, ironically, for many BookSwim users who do not own printers, requires them to venture to a local public library to use a printer there. Emailing BookSwim's support staff and requesting they mail a return label is a possibility, however, doing so requires additional mail and wait time between books.
Ultimately, BookSwim.com is a convenience. It provides at-home book rental services to those willing and able to pay who perhaps prefer not, or are unable to, travel outside to visit a local library. BookSwim is the literary pizza delivery man of the deluxe, expensive pizza the typical "cute" consumer would enjoy. Perhaps in a culture that could benefit from public library endorsement and an increase in healthy living, consumers could put the $59.95/month toward a bicycle and donations of support to local libraries. Perhaps the American consumer could keep in mind the local business and community value that public libraries provide through reading programs, knowledgeable expertise, and friendly advice, and say: "Convenience has a price, and BookSwim's cost is too high."
References
© Emily Hendren, 2010