Read the complete article on Gather.com
by Chris Steib
May 20, 2008 01:26 PM EDT
How many of the books on your shelves have you read? If you’re at all like me, that answer is somewhere between “not many” and “I dunno.” And like other self-proclaimed literary types, I am unfortunately much more of a packrat and impulse buyer than I am a reader, so many of the books I own are either untouched or read only once, and left to take up space (of which I have little) and collect dust (of which I already have too much).
What’s on your shelves now can always be donated or discarded – but how does one move forward without amassing even more unneeded stacks of paper, print, and glue? Well, there’s the library, if you have a decent one near you…if they’re ever open…and if they stock books that interest you. Or you can troll the aisles of B&N, reading a few pages at a time, hoping that between visits someone doesn’t buy the book you’ve clandestinely marked and reshelved.
Or there’s BookSwim.
With more than 200,000 books to choose from, and a simple web interface that kicks off a seamless ship-to-home process, BookSwim is what you’d get if that friend or yours with the awesome literary taste also had generous lending habits to match. It’s what you’d get if Amazon.com had a really, really laid-back return policy. BookSwim is what you’d get if the Bookmobile took steroids.
Seeking to bring to readers the same service that Netflix has delivered (literally) to millions of film fans, BookSwim is an online, ship-to-home book-rental service. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with BookSwim founders George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui, and Press Relations guru Eric Ginsberg, about this unique service they provide, the realities of readership, the economy, and (of course) kitten ransoming.
CS: What are the demands in our current literary (and digital) landscape that BookSwim aims to fulfill?
BookSwim: There is a demand for online shopping (as has been proven by Amazon’s success). There is also an increased demand for home delivery, while a decrease in the desire to necessarily own entertainment media (as is evidenced by Netflix and iTunes). A serious problem in our literary landscape is the debilitating cost of new books, while all intangible art is perceived as having no monetary value. Another problem, especially for those living in a city, is space: who can afford a bigger apartment just because your book collection is getting out of hand? Library funding is being cut left and right causing decreased hours, locations and selection.
BookSwim allows subscribers to shop online, get home delivery, incur no late fees, and pay one low monthly rate to have access to an unlimited number of books.
CS: Does this hurt the already-struggling library system?
BS: Actually, we’re helping them. We’ve recently rolled out a custom plan for libraries that can’t fulfill certain requests for their patrons due to limited selection or a limited number of popular copies. Someday soon, library waiting lists will be a thing of the past.
CS: So who do you expect will use BookSwim?
BS: Our audience is the 36 million Americans who read at least one book each month. Our audience is the same as a late night talk show when they have on an author discussing their latest book. Our audience is old, young, male, female, professionals, students, retirees…anyone who reads books.
CS: Reading is generally accepted to be on the decline – many studies like 2004’s Reading At Risk (not to mention sales figures) have proved this true. Why start a business that caters to a shrinking market?
BS: 73% of Americans read at least one book each year. Of them, the average number of books per year that they read is 20. Those numbers don’t exactly leave us shaking in our boots. That said, even the smallest niche must still be met. In fact, with the onslaught of big-box stores, more and more niche operations are popping up all over the country to fulfill the needs left out by the big-box approach to homogenized selection. I think we’re fine in either case.
CS: How practical is BookSwim for casual readers – the ones on the low end of that scale?
BS: Assuming the casual reader is just that – a reader – then even a casual reader who consumes one new release each month can still be saving an average of $7 every month by using BookSwim.
CS: What is the goal for BookSwim – where do you see it in five or even ten years, and what feature sets would this site and business include?
BS: Our goal is to rent 1,000,000 books by the year 2010. Five years from now? Maybe we’re all wealthy and running a robust fortune 500 company. Ten years from now? We’ll either be tragic stories like on the E! True Hollywood Story or sipping margaritas someplace very warm and comfortable…probably reading a rented book.
In terms of features, we would love for our readers to be able to interact more in a n eclectic way that doesn’t compete with existing book-centered social networking sites. We also want to design applications that will be incorporated with existing social networking sites. We’ll eventually have distribution centers around the country, providing better and faster shipping time to all of our subscribers. We’re already developing programs for libraries, senior centers, schools/colleges and prisons, so in the future; we see that as a very integral part of our business, in addition to the private accounts that we currently offer.
CS: What have been your biggest obstacles in launching so far? How long did it take for you to get your site and business to beta?
BS: It took a year to get our business from the date of incorporation to the public launch date. The biggest obstacle that we have, currently, is shipping time and costs. We’re working on lowering the cost of shipping through a number of ways, but still our biggest single expense is buying books as we grow. That will change when we reach a threshold where the book buying becomes negligible, hopefully through some distributors, publishers and authors. At that point, shipping becomes our biggest expense. Shipping time will be greatly reduced when we open more distribution centers.
CS: Has the recent economic shift proved a significant obstacle as well?
BS: Troubling economic times aren’t negatively affecting our growing subscriber numbers; it only changes the books people are renting. Economic books are more popular, political books are more popular, but at the end of the day, anything Oprah recommends is still predictably gold.
CS: Given the fact that you are making incremental revenue off the purchase of a single piece of copyrighted media…. what, if any, legal rights did you have to acquire in order to profit from the texts you circulate?
BS: We’ve had no trouble thus far. We’ll jump off those bridges as we come to them. Strike that…cross those bridges (you cross bridges, right? that’s what you do with them? …I knew that.) We work and will continue to work diversely with authors and publishers to stay within the confines of legality.
CS: What additional ways, other than membership, do/will you drive revenue?
BS: We discussed institutional lending, which has a huge potential. We also had a meeting and voted against holding kitties for ransom (almost unanimously). Aside from that, anything else you could run would only give our competition opportunity to out-develop us with our own idea, so we’re keeping it under our hats for now.
CS: Netflix adds value to its service by streaming films online. As an online business, what measures will you take to appeal to, attract, and retain a purely digital audience?
BS: We haven’t begun to look into e-books and audiobooks, but despite all my love for Gutenberg, that day will come for us, as well. When has yet to be seen, though.
CS: Which literary/book sites and apps do you use? Given the choice, which would you like to own and run yourself, and what would you change?
BS: Wow, that’s a monster of a question. We work with GoodReads and LibraryThing, as well as Amazon, to varying degrees. Aside from that, all of our software is created in-house.
Which would I like to own? Amazon, of course. Their CEO is a BAZILLIONAIRE!! I would start selling cars and houses on there, too, though. They’ve already diluted their branding enough from what it used to be (online bookstore) that throwing on such high-ticket items wouldn’t be too far-fetched. Hell, they could become a holding company one day and just rule the world. Well, maybe that’s just my vision, though. Anywhoozle, back to books…
CS: I honestly never heard of Booksfree.com, Bookins.com, or some of your other competitors. Other than a good keyword marketing campaign (well done, btw), how do you plan to make book rental as ubiquitous as DVD rental?
BS: I think you just made George blush. Search engine optimization is his guilty pleasure of a hobby. Honestly, book rental will never be as ubiquitous as DVD rental. The fact is that more people would rather watch a movie than read a book, and the gap between those two numbers will undoubtedly continue to widen over time. Oh, and Bookins competes with paperbackswap and bookmooch, not with us. There, you need to pay for shipping and rely on other users to actually come through with your books. We’re an actual company, with human beings tending to the customer service lines. In the long run, we’re more dependable and cheaper than any book-swapping site unless you only want a book or two.
CS: How does BookSwim distinguish itself from these other book-shipping sites?
EG: Our service far exceeds that of “competing” sites like booksfree because we’re the only ones renting paperbacks AND hardcover books. Let’s face it, almost every book on the NY Times bestseller list or in Oprah’s book club are hardcovers. You just can’t rent them online anywhere else.
George: Before we founded BookSwim, we were just looking to subscribe to something like it. We found booksfree was the only one and couldn’t have been less impressed.
Shamoon: They had nothing I wanted to read. It blew my mind. It would be like if Netflix only rented movies that were already playing on network TV. What’s the point?
George: We created BookSwim to be the service we’d want to subscribe to.
CS: Other online businesses like iLike or Flixter are run almost entirely as apps within the open API’s of social networks. What prompted your decision to start a destination site rather than an add-on or application?
Shamoon: It wasn’t a matter of “What type of business do we want to start?” We didn’t weigh our idea against running, say, an add-on business. We knew what we wanted to do, researched to make sure there was a substantial demand and got to work.
George: We love actual books. We love to hold them in our hands as we read and millions of Americans feel the same way. You can’t do that with an application.
Shamoon: Now, that’s not to say that we don’t see applications as a terrific branding opportunity. Just that they’re a means to an end, rather than an end unto themselves.
CS: The Netflix operational model is easily replicated – and in fact, Blockbuster tried and is failing (still). The reason, many have assessed, is technical: Netflix’s famed “million-dollar recommendation engine” and its incredibly smooth user interface. What does BookSwim promise to provide online that will make it much more than just a book-rental site?
BS: Netflix surely does have a 7-year head start on us. We’ll get there. The only trouble that it poses in the meantime is that, people have become so used to Netflix’s incredibly smooth interface that they expect it from every company from day 1. That’s just not plausible. We’re head and shoulders above where any online provider could have hoped to be at our age, five years ago. That’s because technology is moving so quickly and we’re keeping up with it. Another reason why our system won’t fail like Blockbuster’s is that we have many more options than any of our competitors and, by the time we’re out of BETA, having optimized our existing features and rolled out the ones on which we’re working, we’ll slingshot past our competitors so quickly that they’ll find themselves in the same position in which Blockbuster currently finds itself: unable to compete with the gold standard.
CS: BookSwim relies on paper to print and gas to ship. How does your business fit in this increasingly ‘green’ marketplace?
BS: Bookstores rely on paper to print. We reduce the number of books that need to be printed by sharing them among subscribers. Driving your car to and from the store or the library uses gas. Our books traveling, in bulk, aboard USPS trucks is the equivalent of those books taking mass-transit, which we all know is better for the environment than everyone driving their car. We also plant a tree for every gift card we sell. So put THAT in your pipe and smoke it (but seriously, don’t…smoke is air pollution).
CS: Do you feel that your business is a detriment or a benefit to the overall health of the publishing industry? What, if any, pushback from content owners and publishers do you anticipate?
BS: The same as a video rental business or a library, I’d imagine.
CS: And after all this talk about Netflix, do you have any fears about the company’s recent fall from the investment throne? They saw a 23.7%drop, mostly due to rising operational costs like fuel (according to Forbes).
BS: They had to level out eventually. That’s just the market correcting itself. They’ll keep thriving, gamefly will keep thriving, we’ll keep thriving and the world will keep on spinning.
Subscribe