Paperspine - Netflix for books
As someone living with a serious book buying addiction, Paperspine’s beta launch caught my eye.
$15 a month gives you unlimited access to their 15,000 book selection, with free shipping and 2 books out at a time. I’m still debating whether I should jump in at this early stage. Things that are making me hesitate:
- 2 books out at a time with 5 days of media-mail-speed shipping doesn’t sound like a lot. Effectively you’re reading one book at a time and waiting for a week for the other book to get back to you.
- They only have paperback books in their catalog at the moment
- The site needs a lot of work - things I took for granted on Amazon.com and Netflix are missing, including: reviews, recommendations, cover images for every book, decent search, zeitgeist etc.
- No integration with Amazon.com / bookmooch / iRead etc. - I want to auto import existing wish lists, see what my friends are reading etc.
Of course this is a beta launch and I’m sure much of this will be released eventually. But the bar has been set high for other media lines and considering the price of entry here, I don’t feel like I’m getting a great value quite yet.
Posted on December 11th, 2007 under Books, Web • Tags: amazon, Books, paperspine, rental. • 
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August 11th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Other than the reasons you have already stated this service sucks because it has been obsoleted by a library with a website.
They let you check out as many books as you want from their or other library collections (more than 15K books) for free!
Some even have free delivery for lazy (or older) folks.
You might also want to look into greasemonkey — a firefox extension which lets you code your own scripts that you can ‘enhance’ websites with. There’s probably an IE alternative.