deeden

This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from August 2006 and lives here forevermore.

Renting books?

After finishing Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (a fantastic book) this morning I started on the ritual of choosing what I’ll read next. I tend to have a number of books sitting around which I haven’t read and now is no exceptions. I have 6 or 7 candidates which I can pick off a shelf without having to look for them right now. Despite this I had the idea that it would be nice to be able to rent books like we currently do for DVDs from Amazon. Michèle and I have been doing just that for a few months (although we have now graduated to two separate accounts, as I was too slow and didn’t want to rent enough obscure Korean films). I did a brief search for such a thing and the only option I found was booksfree.com which operates only in the US and has a not particularly inspiring collection.

From what I can see no one else providing this service, although I’m happy to be corrected. It might be an idea for some libraries to get together and do this. They can increase membership and income at a time when library usage is falling, and I can read all of the history books I want to and be very lazy about it too :)