Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Electronic Commerce |
Founded | 2007 |
Defunct | 2010 |
Fate | Acquired by BookLender |
Headquarters | Newark, New Jersey |
Key people | Jeevan Padiyar, CEO George Burke, Co-Founder/CMO Nick Ruffilo CTO/CIO Georg Richter, Chairman Shamoon Siddiqui, Co-founder |
Products | Book rental service |
BookSwim was a private American online book rental service, offering rental-by-mail of both hardcover and paperback books. The company was launched in 2007. [1]
George Burke co-founded BookSwim with friend Shamoon Siddiqui in April 2007, in Shamoon's basement for the first ten months of the company's existence. [2] The company branched out, briefly moving to Aberdeen, NJ before establishing headquarters in Newark, NJ with distribution facilities in eastern Pennsylvania.
BookSwim provided unlimited rental-by-mail of hardcover and paperback books on a monthly subscription basis. Subscribers add books to their online reading list, called a Rental Pool. When the subscriber returned finished books, the next books in the Rental Pool would ship out. The similarity to Netflix's business model led to the website informally being called the 'Netflix for books.' [3] BookSwim's plans began at $9.99 per month and included only hardcover and paperback books.
BookSwim entered and won Rutgers University’s Business Plan Competition in 2008 and an accompanying cash prize of $20,000. [4] The company was named a 'Startup to Watch' by Entrepreneur Magazine, [1] and the New Jersey Technology Council.
BookSwim's subscribers tended to be high-income avid readers who read over forty books a year; roughly 80% of them were female. [5] As "the core of [the] business is in bestsellers," [5] BookSwim cited its rental of hardcovers as its main competitive edge over competitor Booksfree. [6]
Though libraries’ reactions to BookSwim included anxiety [7] and resentment, [8] BookSwim claimed to not see itself as competition with libraries. [2] The company expressed interest in taking libraries on as customers [9] and its co-founders appeared at the 2008 Colorado Interlibrary Loan Conference to speak about potential partnerships with them. [10] In October 2008, BookSwim donated an extra 13,000 books from its inventory to the Newark Public Library near its new offices. [11]
Netflix is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service. The service primarily distributes original and acquired films and television shows from various genres, and it is available internationally in multiple languages.
A paperback book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardback (hardcover) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic.
Blockbuster Video is an American multimedia brand and former video rental store chain. It was founded by David Cook in 1985 as a stand-alone mom-and-pop home video rental shop, but later grew into a national store chain featuring video game rentals, DVD-by-mail, streaming, video on demand, and cinema theater. The company expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster employed 84,300 people worldwide and operated 9,094 stores.
Eric Flint was an American author, editor, and e-publisher. The majority of his works are alternate history science fiction, but he also wrote humorous fantasy adventures. His works have been listed on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Locus magazine best seller lists. He was a co-founder and editor of the Baen Free Library.
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix, and currently sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations. A former member of the California State Board of Education, he is also an advocate for education reform through charter schools.
DVD-by-mail is a business model in which customers rent DVDs and similar discs containing films, television shows, video games and the like, ordering online for delivery to the customer by mail. Generally, all interaction between the renter and the rental company takes place through the company's website, using an e-commerce model. Typically, a customer chooses from a list of titles online and adds titles to a queue. As a customer's requested titles become available, the company sends them out. When the customer is finished with the disc, they mail it back to the company.
LoveFilm was a United Kingdom–based provider of DVD-by-mail and streaming video on demand in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Germany.
Better World Books is an American online bookseller of used and new books, founded in 2002 by students of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
Dell Publishing Company, Inc. is an American publisher of books, magazines and comic books, that was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte Jr. with $10,000, two employees and one magazine title, I Confess, and soon began turning out dozens of pulp magazines, which included penny-a-word detective stories, articles about films, and romance books.
Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform.
BookLender is an online book rental company, the first to offer flat rate rental-by-mail to customers in the United States. Established in 2000 and headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, it boasts an inventory of over 100,000 titles and more than 13,000 subscribers. On June 8, 2007, the company announced that it had delivered its millionth book.
Random House of Canada was the Canadian distributor for Random House, Inc. from 1944 until 2013. On July 1, 2013, it amalgamated with Penguin Canada to become Penguin Random House Canada.
Olivia is a fictional pig character in a series of children's picture books written and illustrated by the late Ian Falconer, the first entry of which was published in 2000. A computer animated television series of the same name inspired by the character premiered in 2009.
John R. "Trip" Adler III is an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Scribd, a digital library and document-sharing platform, which has 80 million users.
Thirteen Reasons Why is a young adult novel written by Jay Asher in 2007, which follows the story of Hannah Baker, a high school freshman, and the thirteen reasons why she has died by suicide. Following her death, Hannah leaves behind a series of seven double-sided cassette tapes detailing the thirteen specific people and events that she blames for her demise. Two weeks after her death, these cassette tapes are mailed out with directions to pass the tapes on to the next person on the tape. Hannah's life story is conveyed through these tapes, which are narrated by Hannah herself, and through the point of view of Clay, her classmate and the ninth person to receive the tapes. The inspiration behind the main character, Hannah Baker, comes from author Jay Asher's close relative who attempted suicide.
An ebook, also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
Quickflix was an Australian company that provided online DVD and Blu-ray Disc rental by mail as well as internet streaming of movies and television shows via online pay-per-view or subscription.
Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Marc Bernays Randolph is an American tech entrepreneur, advisor and speaker. He is the cofounder and first CEO of Netflix.
Talking Book World was an American retail chain which sold and rented audiobooks on CDs and cassette tapes. Headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, the chain operated more than 45 stores across eight U.S. states and Canada at its peak. It was among the largest U.S. chains specializing in audiobooks.