There was a comment from someone from bookswim and after taking a look and thinking about it a bit, I thought I’d write down my thoughts.
BookSwim aims to be the netflix for books. Here’s how it works -
- You pick out books for your ‘pool’ – the equivalent of your DVD queue on NetFlix.
- As and when books in your pool become available, they are mailed to you.
- You can keep the books as long as you like – there are no late fees, and no due dates. Edit: Total number of books you have out at any time are restricted by what plan you have. More on that later.
- Mail books back when you are finished, and new ones from your pool will be mailed to you.
Shipping both ways is free, and there is no limit on how many books can be read in a month. I guess the shipping times must put some restriction on how many books you can actually get and read. There are four plans to choose from -
- 3 books out at a time, for $19.98 a month. You can hold 1 book, and send 2 back, to get another 2 books.
- 5 books out at a time, for $24.97 a month. You can hold 2 books, and send 3 back to get another 3 books.
- 7 books out at a time, for $29.96 a month. You can hold 4 books with you and send 3 back to get another 3 books.
- 11 books out at a time, for $39.94 a month. You can hold 4 books and send back 7 books to receive another 7 books.
The first few things that I wondered were -
- Why do this? Well, rather helpfully, the website has the backstory which I’ll let you read yourself. The company sent out its first book in March 2007.
- How many people actually use BookSwim? Well, quantcast estimates 37.6K people a month. So there very well might be a large enough customer base.
- Revenues? Well, even if you take just 20% of visitors are subscribers, and all of them are on the lowest plan, that’s 7.5K people, each paying $240 a year. That equates to a nice 1.8 million in revenue yearly. That’s a nice little revenue stream to have in 1.75 years of incorporating. Edit: Please take these estimates for what they are – very approximate guesses.
- Their future plans? They aim to have rented out 1 million books by 2010.
I do think it’s a good idea. Mark Cuban had a post on the path of least resistance and I think that anything that makes things easier is always going to be a success (provided the other parts of the plan aren’t too unrealistic). BookSwim might very well have a very bright future ahead of it. So, do give BookSwim a look.
Filed under: books Tagged: | bookswim, review of netflix for books
George from Bookswim here.
Switch, very clever logic used to determine revernue and customer base, and you know what. You’re not far off.
In October we mailed out our 100,000th book, so we’re getting there. And, yes, posting on blogs always helps
If only society had some kind of institution where we stored a lot of books and let the public borrow them for a time. Possibly some kind of tax-supported system. With personnel who knew how to find the books you wanted, even if they weren’t at the storage facility near you.
I know! We could call it a “library.” But no, that’s not web 2.0 libertarianismic enough. Let’s call it BookMobCrowdJet.
Well… I am wondering why do this. If I want to read a book and return it I’ll use my library. My public libraries has a good deal of the books I want and I am already paying fo that service (taxes).
Maybe if you don’t have a good public library nearby I could see using this…
Now if this was an online service… that would be a different story (no pun intended).
libraries often have atrocious hold wait times for popular books. I recently was the 105th person waiting for 5 copies of a book from the Seattle Public Library System.
If you have private subscription dollars funding purchase of additional copies – I possibly could get to read these this years new books before they are last years books!