$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.

Choice tidbits: “I’ll tell you a story about an incident that I’m sure is part of the reason we are what we are. Sometime around May of 1997 we were put on a deathwatch by a well-known industry pundit. His argument was a simple one: Barnes & Noble had just launched their website, and we had only 125 employees at the time, and something like $60 million in annual sales… They had 30,000 employees at that time, and $3 billion in sales.”