BookSwim

» see bookswim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui started BookSwim in April 2007 and ran it out of Siddiqui's basement for the first ten months. The company moved briefly to Aberdeen, New Jersey before settling in Newark, with its shipping operation over the state line in eastern Pennsylvania. Jeevan Padiyar came in as chief executive and Georg Richter as chairman, with Nick Ruffilo running the technology. In 2008 it won Rutgers University's business plan competition and the $20,000 that came with it.

The pitch was one sentence long and everybody understood it immediately: Netflix, but for books. Plans started at $9.99 a month for unlimited rental by mail, hardcover and paperback both, shipping paid in both directions and nothing resembling a late fee. What made it defensible, at least on paper, was hardcovers. The company said openly that the core of the business was bestsellers, and bestsellers come out in hardcover first, which was the thing its rival Booksfree did not do.

The readers it found were a narrow and committed group. Roughly eighty percent were women, most of them higher-income, and the typical subscriber got through more than forty books a year. In October 2008 the company gave 13,000 surplus volumes from its own inventory to the Newark Public Library, a few blocks from the new office.

~ the case file ~

~ the rental pool ~

You kept a list called a Rental Pool, which was the queue. Books shipped from it, you read them at whatever pace suited you, and when you sent finished ones back the next titles in the list went out. There was no clock anywhere in the system, which was the entire emotional argument against a library.

The mechanism only works inside one postal system. A flat monthly fee covering unlimited round trips assumes cheap, reliable, nationally uniform domestic shipping, and the moment you cross a border the arithmetic collapses. That is why there was never a Turkish version of this, or a Turkish Netflix-by-mail either. The product was less a bookshop than an argument about what the United States Postal Service cost.

~ the letter on the homepage ~

Sometime after April 2013 the storefront was replaced. What went up in its place was a scanned letter above a sign-in form pointing at booksfree.com. Underneath it sat one line: still need to get in touch with BookSwim? Email [email protected].

The letter did the whole handover in a dozen bullets. Accounts and rental pools had been transferred to Booksfree's system. Existing BookSwim passwords would work there. Each member was mapped to the Booksfree plan matching the number of books their old plan allowed, at a lower monthly cost. Gift plans and service credit carried over. Anyone who did not want to continue had to go to Booksfree's website to cancel, which is a small indignity on top of a large one. And then: you may keep any books still in your possession, free of charge. It closed by thanking tens of thousands of readers nationwide, since 2007.

~ what the record actually says ~

Wikipedia has had this wrong for years. Its infobox gives the company as defunct in 2010 and its fate as acquired by BookLender, and neither claim carries a citation or appears anywhere in the article body.

The archive settles it. On 23 April 2013 bookswim.com was still serving its full storefront, roughly nine kilobytes of it, with Fifty Shades of Grey and Gone Girl on the front page. By 19 August 2013 that page was gone and the letter was up. In October 2014 the domain had decayed to "Site Temporarily Unavailable," and it is a GoDaddy for-sale lander today. As for BookLender: that was Booksfree, which renamed itself on 2 November 2016, more than three years after it absorbed BookSwim. The encyclopedia credits the acquisition to a company that did not yet have the name.

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