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BOOKSWIM BOOK RENTAL CLUB
Most new moms don’t have time to buy books – let alone read them. This cool service allows you to read and return at leisure. Bonus: right now, the company is offering a $10 gift card to all new customers.
Buy It: Bookswim.com, $23.95 for 3 at-a-time book plan
America’s Only Hardcover and Bestseller Rental Club Offers paperbacks and hardcovers Netflix®-style directly to your house, now even faster and more affordable.
NEW YORK, NY — BookSwim (www.bookswim.com), America’s “Netflix-style” book rental club has launched a new rental plan that benefit subscribers and shape the growing rental industry’s future. The most dramatic new features, standard on all plans, include:
“Our readers are happier that books now arrive so quickly. BookSwim’s new plans are a success because they’re so radically different,” states CTO Nick Ruffilo. “We no longer need to receive the return at our facility before the next is shipped. We took a risk and the result is turnaround time being cut in half. That’s huge! Something even Netflix or Blockbuster won’t offer!”
Ruffilo goes on to explain, “With a changeover to UPS Mail Innovations (www.ups-mi.com) for outbound shipping service, BookSwimmers in California, Washington, and Oregon are seeing the biggest gains — as much as a 60-70% time decrease round-trip. More time with books in your hands rather than in-transit, means the value BookSwimmers see increases significantly.”
Additionally, for $9.95, occasional or infrequent readers can now rent any book monthly for the low price of $9.95 with the inception of a 1-book-per-month plan.
“Sometimes people just want to rent a book. If it’s a new hardcover, they’ll save 50-66%”, adds George Burke, co-founder and CMO. “Books like Dan Brown’s ‘Lost Symbol’, Glenn Beck’s ‘Arguing with Idiots’, or ‘A Touch of Dead’ by Charlaine Harris are all ‘Exclusive at BookSwim.’”
Burke continues, “Think of BookSwim like a movie on opening night instead of waiting for the DVD. We’re the only membership club renting hardbacks – the format of choice for newly published books like next week’s releases ‘Moonwalk’ by Michael Jackson or ‘Nine Dragons’ by Michael Connelly, with the paperback versions maybe arriving a year later. Even today, we still continue to rent Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ exclusively, a year after its November 2008 publication date.”
Other added features of BookSwim’s new plans are:
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About BookSwim.com
Launched in May 2007, BookSwim (http://www.bookswim.com) is the first and only online paperback and
hardcover book rental library club, allowing subscribers to rent books with free return shipping and no due dates or late fees. With nationwide coverage, the book rental service offers hardcover new releases to paperback classics. BookSwim subscription plans start at $9.95 per month, with an option for members to purchase the books they love.
It’s November and the weather has taken a turn for the dreary. In an effort to help everyone become a little more cheerful, here’s a light-hearted romp through this week’s literary news:
Museum ‘of story and storytelling’ planned for Oxford
An online dream touches down from the internet to reality– namely, into Rochester House in Oxford, mere blocks away from Christ Church College where many scenes from the recent Harry Potter movies were filmed. “There must be something in the waters of the Isis that gets into the system of Oxford residents, magically causing them to think of and bring to life unforgettable characters and plots,” said Oxfordshire-based children’s author Mary Hoffman.
–Literary Review’s 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize Strikes Again. Prizes have not yet been chosen, but take a look at these excerpts (if you can stomach the prose!) and see which one gets your vote.
–Overdue library books return century and a half later, all fees paid. Speaking of due dates and late fees: imagine receiving a $1,000 bill from your library, fifty years later!
–“Tokyo Vice” Author Goes To Japan Seeking Enlightenment, Ends Up Writing About Organized Crime. Journalism teachers will tell you to follow the story wherever it leads. It led Jake Adelstein to be placed under police protection– but the story seems to be worth it.
–A dark and stormy night: and slightly better first sentences from new books. With a first sentence like “Of Filastro Agustín’s seven children, the only one he couldn’t bear to beat was his youngest son, Edmund,” how could it be bad?
–Neil Gaiman continues to wreck the grade curve for other fantasy writers. How do we love Gaiman’s new Graveyard Book? From the Newbery medal to the Locus young adult award and the Hugo best novel prize, to the longlisted for the Carnegie medal and shortlist for the World Fantasy award, in quite a number of ways. Gaiman says he was pleasantly surprised, though “the trouble with saying that is that you always sound vaguely insincere – people assume that with each award the book wins, saying you are surprised is less and less plausible.”
With so many awards under his belt, I wonder if Gaiman will wander off to sweep other genre’s prizes. Do you think he’s liable to branch out (and you thought your supremacy was safe, best-selling authors everywhere!)?
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