BooksFree: When I lived in New York one of the many services of the local corner store was a lending library of assorted books. 25 cents a day. BooksFree is a web biz, you pay them a few bucks a month, you give then a list of books your interested in, they then send a few to you. When your finished with those you send them back and they send you next ones on your list. Paperbacks only, but free shipping. Stuff your local library doesn’t carry. Similar, of course, to NetFlix. While I’ve yet to tried them,
this is a nice article about them.
I was thrilled when I learned about Booksfree, but after a couple of weeks of membership I must say I’m disappointed. I joined as an avid fictionn reader. Booksfree seems to carry mostly mass-market paperbacks, and within that category genre fiction. There’s very little literary fiction–not even the paper editions of major literary prize winners.
Booksfree is probably fine if you live very near them. I’m in WA and it took 8 days minimum each way. Just was not a positive experience. In the end when you include time to read the book you only get one turnaround a month and pricewise it is not worth it. Better to buy used through amazon or use your local library. Most libraries have agreements with larger branches where you can get almost any book you want. Or even a used book store is better. Plus although booksfree has quite a lot of titles they are limited to really popular books that have gone to paper, so often booksfree does not have a title you’re really interested in.