Paperspine - Online Rentals For Book Lovers

The movie rental business was revolutionized by the launch of Netflix and its online monthly rental subscription service that eliminated trips to the store, late fees, as well as a lot of business for the once mega-popular Blockbuster chain of stores. It even led Blockbuster to follow suit, however unsuccessful the attempt was, just to fight to stay in business.

Now, Paperspine is a new online venture that is aiming to transform the same successful subscription model used by Netflix into an innovative rental service for books. For the same reasons that movie lovers embraced Netflix, book readers should be just as overjoyed to be able to skip trips to the store and high costs of multiple book purchases only for each to be read once.

Just as with online movie rentals, subscribers of Paperspine are able to create a queue of their top literary picks, with 2-5 being mailed at a time (depending on subscription plan chosen), and no late fees of any kind. “Our goal is to revolutionize the way people discover, receive, and read books by coupling the convenience of the Internet with the borrowing system long established by libraries.”

Aware that not everyone has the same reading habits, the four plans offered by Paperspine start at $9.95 per month and range up to $24.95 per month, but be aware that the base plan has a catch. As seen in the image below, the Frequent plan ($14.95), Avid plan ($19.95), and Family plan ($24.95) all offer free shipping and an unlimited number of book rentals each month, with the only variation being that the Frequent plan offers only 2 books out at a time, while the Avid and Family Plans allow for 3 and 5 books out at a time, respectively. The basic (Light) subscription for $9.95 appears to be the same as the Frequent plan with 2 books at a time, but the difference here is that shipping of the books is not free ($1.49 per book), whereas the other three plans offer free shipping. With that said, I can only see the Light subscription being beneficial for those who read less than 3 books per month.

The library of available books seems quite well stocked, especially for a service that launched just two short weeks ago. A wide selection of genres is available to readers with over 30 categories available in both fiction and non-fiction writings. According to Paperspine, there are already 150,000 titles available in their growing catalog.

Shipping of books takes approximately 3-5 days, and each is sent with a postage pre-paid bag in which to ship the book back to Paperspine after reading.

This service is currently running in beta, so expect new features to be added as Paperspine matures, one of which should be the ability to notify the service that you would like to keep a book you have received, for an additional charge of course. Currently, developers ask that customers email them at feedback@paperspine.com so that they may manually charge your account.

The rental scheme for the literary market is a very innovative approach that has just as much possibility as Netflix when it launched. Given time, I am sure that we will see both the user base and library of books grow and help turn Paperspine into a popular niche rental service.

A similar service that has been covered here on Profy is BookSwim .