{"id":1447,"date":"2008-01-29T04:35:53","date_gmt":"2008-01-29T12:35:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/29\/book-rental\/"},"modified":"2008-02-03T07:16:21","modified_gmt":"2008-02-03T15:16:21","slug":"book-rental","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/29\/book-rental\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Rental&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So these past few weeks, I&#8217;ve been hearing this commercial on the radio touting that they&#8217;re the Netflix of books, where you pay a monthly subscription and you can rent out 2, 3, or 4 books at a time. There&#8217;s no late fees and the books are mailed to your door. This struck me immediately as very odd since this sounds like a service that wants to replace the <strong>library<\/strong> which is a FREE service.<\/p>\n<p>Fuzzywuzzy posted this screenshot:<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/gallery.krunk4ever.com\/d\/16887-1\/book_rental_service.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/gallery.krunk4ever.com\/d\/16889-2\/book_rental_service.png\" alt=\"book rental service\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>book rental service?<\/strong> &#8211; Selekta<\/p>\n<p>was just thinking. my sister does -alot- of reading, and spends like $1000 a year on just books alone. most of them she reads once then never looks at again. is there any kind of like&#8230;video rental store but for books? would make things alot cheaper, plus once one person has read the next person can get enjoyment from it etc<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And this prompted me to blog about it. I don&#8217;t exactly recall the name of the book rental service that was advertised on the radio, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bookswim.com\/\">BookSwim<\/a> sounds awfully close. There was also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.booksfree.com\/\">Booksfree.com<\/a>, but I&#8217;m pretty sure that wasn&#8217;t the one that was advertised on the radio. I understand libraries can sometimes be horrible, but as library gets more and more modernized, I can&#8217;t see a book rental service as hardly useful. The libraries here in Seattle allows you to reserve books online and when the book is ready for pickup, it sends you an email.<\/p>\n<p>I talked this over a bit with RayAlome, and there are some downsides to the library:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Books have due dates (usually ~2 weeks). They can typically be renewed, unless it&#8217;s new or someone else has reserved it.<\/li>\n<li>There might be a long queue for new books (i.e. Harry Potter), but just like Netflix, I don&#8217;t think a book rental service can guarantee you&#8217;ll get new releases immediately either, but they might be faster than the library in getting you the book.<\/li>\n<li>You have to actually go to the library to pick up your book, instead of having them mail it to you.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also found some problems that a book rental service has that a DVD service doesn&#8217;t. First, books comes in different shapes and sizes, while DVDs are a 1 size fit all. Therefore packaging material needs to be customized or be highly flexible. Books aren&#8217;t exactly light either, though with medial mail, you can still ship 2lbs for under $3. However, that might mean it&#8217;ll take up to 8 days for the book to get to you and going back also takes that amount of time. I don&#8217;t see them having warehouses in different parts of the country set up like Netflix, since they&#8217;re barely starting, but maybe they&#8217;ll have some sort of agreement with USPS or UPS to have faster shipping for cheap.<\/p>\n<p>We also talked about the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Amazon-com-kindle\/dp\/B000FI73MA\/?tag=krunk4everblog-20\">Amazon.com Kindle<\/a>, but that&#8217;s a story for another time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So these past few weeks, I&#8217;ve been hearing this commercial on the radio touting that they&#8217;re the Netflix of books, where you pay a monthly subscription and you can rent out 2, 3, or 4 books at a time. There&#8217;s no late fees and the books are mailed to your door. This struck me immediately &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/29\/book-rental\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Book Rental&#8230;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[293,47,295,296,294],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krunk4ever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}