Read the full article at CaliforniaChronicle.com

Let me introduce you to Bookswim.com or 1-877-Bookswim. Bookswim is your non-traditional book renter. Norm Goldman, editor/owner of Bookpleasures was approached by the owner of Bookswim to review his services and products, but Norm lived in Canada and the books could not ship to Canada so he asked me if I would be willing to review this relatively new service provider. I accepted this challenge and the results of that review are below.

Bookswim.com is an easily navigable web site for renting books of various genres by numerous authors and that ease of navigability helps make this process more enjoyable. There are a variety of plans to pick from depending on how much/little you read and what best fits your budget. Prices range from $9.95 per month to $59.95 per month depending on how many or few books you like to read. I just noticed that for a short while Bookswim is running a special where you can sign up for any plan for just $9.95! And that includes shipping both ways too!

The first thing you do is check which plan best fits your thirst to read, select next, fill in your account and shipping information, determine if you want the free shipping or expedited shipping (faster if you want it that way, but also incurs additional costs), and then begin selecting the types of books you like to read. You can search for books according to title or author. There are old and new books, title-wise and so many to choose from that you will feel like you are at a book store instead of sitting at your laptop.

I was given a two month free membership in order to perform this review, but the owner, Norm, and I may be the only ones who were aware of that. I followed all of the steps detailed above and waited for an e-mail confirmation that my order was being compiled and shipped. All started out fine and both confirmations came along without a hitch. A few days later I received an e-mail telling me that my selections could not ship as anticipated, but no other explanations were given. I replied to customer service and the owner asking them what was amiss and why those books could not ship. A few days later I got a reply and the books were shipped. The books arrived a week or so later, exactly as I had originally reserved. I had one Stuart Woods book, one Michael Crichton, and the newest Dan Brown novel in that parcel. The next mishap came when there was no return label. Remember I was being treated like a regular customer and this is perhaps the very best one can hope for in a review sense. I called the 877 number listed above and spoke to an actual person who was concerned and helpful in remedying this problem. The return label arrived a few days after that call to customer service. I devoured and enjoyed them all and I´ve just sent them all back.

If I were asked to rate their service on a scale of one to ten, ten being the top, I would give them a ten for customer service and an eight for my first experience with them. Not bad all things considered. So if any of you are looking for a unique way to read without spending a lot of money purchasing your favorite authors this may be something you want to consider. You can tweak it to work however you want and suspend or cancel your membership at any time without penalty. What more could you ask for? Jump right in and join Bookswim.com.

Read the full article at CaliforniaChronicle.com

It’s finally done and complete. BookSwim’s THE GIFT OF READING App lets you send free $10 gift cards to 20 of your favorite reading buddies on Facebook.

First, become a BookSwim Fan Page by clicking the button below:

THE GIFT OF READING is our first app! Give it a try here:

The illustrious Nick here at BookSwim has released the current bane of my existence. It’s a spelling game called Well Versed– and just as when I play Scrabble, I keep resorting to endless series of four-letter words. Can’t help it– ‘help’, ’soon’ and ‘hear’ are just so easy to identify in the scrambled word pool and give a pleasant little bump in my self-esteem every time.

Play Well Versed

Also, I have to ask: who is the illustrious RobinSki, our current all-time winner?

Try the game out and see how you fare! Hopefully, you’ll wrack up more 5+-letter words than I have.

–Chip

Every author has his or her own style when it comes to writing but a notable size of authors write while listening to music. Some authors choose to have the radio on in the background, whereas other choose to put their playlist on random. Quite a few even build a specific playlist for each book that they write. If you look up some of your favorite authors, they tend to post their playlists on their blogs. I personally fall into the last category where I select a choice few songs to listen to over and over while I write.

What I find odd with myself is that I like to read in total silence. My wife reads with music or TV on in the background, but me, I like to focus and concentrate on whatever I’m reading. Actually, I think its more that reading for me is not a creative process, and it strains my brain to try to digest the other stimulus as well as the emotions/thoughts I have from reading. For me, writing and reading are two very different processes.

I’ve also noticed that the playlists for many authors (at least the ones who actually complete books) tend to be short (no longer than 30 minutes long). For me, it has been very similar, and the size of the playlist has no bearing on the size of the text I’m writing.

In college, I did quite a bit of writing, ranging from 500 word short stories to 35,000 word novellas. In all cases, my playlist consisted of around six or seven songs. The only exception to that was when I put on a techno/trance song that was one-hour seventeen minutes long – which I listened to on repeat about 10 times to finish something I wrote. The music that drove my writing varied from techno to classical to industrial to Japanese pop.

How does music effect your reading? Do you listen to music when you read or write? Can you guess what music an author may have been listening to?

-Nick

I fell in love with independent bookstores one rainy September night in the Lower East Side of New York City, back in the Halcyon days of my ill-spent youth. We(others shall remain nameless)’d finally but cheerfully been chased out of a bar two hours after last call, when all the trains back to New Jersey had stopped for the night. A man we’d just met in the bar asked if we wanted to stop by his store for awhile, and with nowhere else to go, my friend (looking greener every minute) and I took him up on the invitation.

Once we pulled the gate up and ducked inside, my friend scuttled into the bathroom and the man proceeded to tell me about the darkened room while making cups of fair trade coffee. “A lot of love went into this room,” he said, eyes clearly shining with pride and a touch of weariness, while I surveyed an area slightly larger than my kitchen with dim shelves and books with unfamiliar names. He talked about how being forty and barely affording his New York apartment became worthwhile because it meant making this place possible.

It was only weeks after my (arguably conscious) friend and I stumbled out to the subway that we realized where we had been. Turns out my friend had retreated into the bathroom of one of the last independent radical bookstores in New York City, the kind of place where you go to meet reincarnated Beat novelists, Palestinian slam poets, radical queer activists, dumpster-diving freegans with dredlocks who survive on $10 a week, genderqueer feminists and modern-day Pagans. Y’know– the kinds of people we go to cities to gawk and laugh and wonder at (and sometimes wind up becoming).

As one reviewer remarks on yelp.com: “If there’s a better selection of books and tools in New York to help you challenge the Eurocentric, masculinist knowledge validation process and oppose all of the false assumptions undergirding the hegemonic paradigm, I’m not aware of it.” And there’s the glory and downfall of independent bookstores in a long-winded erudite nutshell.

When we write down our To Read lists, what kinds of books do we establish as worthwhile? What do we wind up reading, if anything? If a long day of work leaves our minds reeling and craving nothing but a light Janet Evanovich, when do we create spaces in our lives for Beauvoir, Burroughs, even Homer– the heavy stuff of intellectual transformation? I’m saying this as a former English major down to maybe five completed books a year.

There were times when the opening of a radical bookstore meant the defiant expression of an alternate culture, a subversive stream of thought carving its space into the ordinary world. It sometimes meant
telephone threats, bomb threats, windows broken, in the case of the store Lambda Rising (soon to close). And how radical the effects are when that tiny defiance gathers voices and grows! How vital our bookstores were when they were the only places in all the mute world where we could hear our own voices! When New Jersey is on the verge of becoming the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage equality, it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like when that gay bookstore’s survival was in doubt.

The time for radical bookstores may be passing, or so that man said to me back on that September night, talking about the rent in Manhattan that had chased all the other radical bookstores from the area. And the internet has opened other kinds of avenues for culture to germinate and flourish.

For all the convenience of the online world, though– some nights, what I wouldn’t give to sip a cup of fair trade coffee between ill-lit, cramped shelves…

Ah, December… when tens of thousands of new novelists, victorious conquerors of National Novel Writing Month, can finally close the laptop in triumph and catch some sleep.

Entry is officially open to BookSwim’s 2009 NaNoWriMo Competition. Winners will have their novels published and available for rental in BookSwim’s catalog!

Prizes
20 Semi-Finalists: 1 free month of BookSwim
5 Grand Prize Winners: Your book rented through BookSwim!

How to Enter

Start with a bang! Copy and paste the first 1,000 words of your novel into the body of your email program along with your name, brief (3 – 5 sentence) summary of your novel, and your preferred method of contact, then attach the first 10,000 words in an .rtf, .doc / .docx, or .pdf file. You need not stop mid-sentence to get exactly 10,000 words– just come to a logical stop as close as you can to that word limit. Make our judges want the rest of the story!

Email your submission to the ONE email address that best corresponds to the genre of your novel:

Speculative fiction (horror, fantasy, science fiction): nanospecfic@bookswim.com
Mystery / thriller: nanomystery@bookswim.com
Historical fiction: nanohistory@bookswim.com
Romance: nanoromance@bookswim.com
Contemporary / mainstream / literary: nanolit@bookswim.com

Submissions begin immediately and close December 31st.

Questions? Comment below or email cobrien@bookswim.com, or click this link for Official Rules and contest details.

Congrats to all the winners of NaNoWriMo. Now let’s get your novel out where the world can see it!

Read the full article at Babble.com

………BookSwim – $13.98/month and up

Whether Dad (or anyone!) leisurely enjoys a book from time to time or devours any paperback in his path, BookSwim offers a no-fail gift idea. Think of it as Netflix for the bookish: They send you a book of your choice, you read it, send it back and then — look at that! —another book is on your doorstep. Plans range from one book a month to eleven books at a time, and with an unlimited selection, no due dates and no shipping costs, this is a gift that keeps giving and giving and giving.

Get it from BookSwim.

Babble has a 3-month BookSwim subscription to give away! Drop us a line at babblecontest@gmail.com with BookSwim in the subject line to win……..

Read the full article at Babble.com

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend.  I spent my days relaxing, eating leftovers and partaking in something I call “The Big Clean,” which is where I clean my house in preparation for Christmas/New Years (when my house gets unclean once again).

Keeping with the Monday Mayhem tradition, this is the final installment of All Roads Lead to BookSwim.  I’m sure in a few weeks there will be new search terms to look at, but for now, this is all we have.

little girl wants her rent – Thank you, Will Ferrel.
low carb casserole – Life’s short, eat carbs.  Unless you are our founder, George, who has a gluten allergy.
marijuana horticulture – I’m not sure you can rent consumables, or illegal substances…
messy girls naked – If by girls you mean books, and by naked you mean without their dust jackets.  Though our books keep their dust jackets on.
moms sexy honk – Beep beep!  Honk honk!
news 12 buckwild – We goin’ get buckwild?
pass pokemon platinum official strategy guide – BookSwim uses avid reader.  It’s super-effective.
rent a bitch – I met a dog breeder whose business card was ‘A stud for every bitch.’
rent a monkey for a day – Here, you can rent books as long as you want.
rent a sharkskin suit – I think you’re looking for Avelle
rent a vortex – Aunty M, Aunty M, it’s a twista!
seven naked happy girls – It’s two better than 5!
wacky questions and answers – Why’d the chicken cross the road?  Potatoes.
where did speak the book took place and time? – It be grammar lesson timez now?
why columbus sailed east to the indies – To rent books from BookSwim?

I hope you’re all enjoying your days.  Don’t forget to get gifts for those you love.

Do you have an idea for Monday Mayhem?  Let us know.

-Nick

Monday was a crazy day and our normal Monday Mayhem got a bit delayed.  But, I wouldn’t want you to feel like me completely forgot you, so I’m making up for it by posting today.  And we’ve got some good ones for you.
generation t 108 ways to transform a t shirt – Is this a Bubba Gump shrimp reference?
how can i meet amir blumenfeld – Who is Amir Blumenfeld?
how many presidents have had syphilis? – A shockingly interesting answer.  Not sure what it is, but I’m sure it’s shocking.
how to rent clothes for men – Ew?
hydrocodone 5mg/325mg dosage – We rent books.  We don’t sell drugs.  Have we not gotten that message out?
im writing a novel about an italian falling in love with an irish – Sounds like a plan – when it’s done, let us know and we’ll add it to the catalog.
invisible man ‘i am an invisible man. no, i am not a spook like those who haunted edgar allan poe means – Say that three times fast…
iowa farm life in 1900 – I’m sure it wasn’t easy.
is the current economic and political crisis actually prophesied in the bible? – For every event there were 99,999 crazy people predicting something else and one “sane” person who predicted things correctly.  My bets are that one person was wrong about every other prediction they made.
landlord tax writeoffs – BookSwim is not a tax writeoff.  Sorry.
lessons for too many toys – Did google read my Christmas list?

-Nick

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!)?

Lately there has been huge buzz about the lack of women in some of the largest publications’ book lists.  One example is Publishers Weekly’s Top Books of 2009 list which was completely devoid of women authors.  This has sparked an interesting debate as well as a hot trending topic on twitter #fembook.  BookSwim understands the importance of equal representation – and that doesn’t mean that there needs to be an even amount of men and women within any given book list, but that there is an equal vetting process.  We took a look at our Top Favorited Authors page.  This page is generated by the number of members we have that have selected an author as their favorite.  One could call it a popularity contest in a way.  As of writing this article, 7 of the top 10 authors are women.

#1 James Patterson

#2 Jodi Picoult

#3 Dean Koontz

#4 Stephanie Meyer

#5 Janet Evanovich

#6 Laurell K. Hamilton

#7 Nicholas Sparks

#8 Nora Roberts

#9 Jennifer Weiner

#10 Charlaine Harris

What are your thoughts on the top 10 “Most Favorited” authors?

-Nick