Have you ever wished you could rent eleven books at a time through the mail? Well, now you can … and we’re still trying to figure out why you would.

The concept of BookSwim is exactly like that of Netflix in that you pick a plan for the number of books you would like to check out at any given time.  You can choose 1 book, 3 books, 5 books, 7 books and 11 books, and all of them offer free shipping both directions except for the one book at a time plan.  If you find you really enjoyed a book, and would like to keep it, you do have the option of purchasing the book without having to send it back.

While we understand the lure of Netflix, and have a subscription here at the office that  we love, your average movie is two hours in length, you can quickly turn over your rentals to get the most out of your subscription.  Unless you are a speed reader, getting the maximum return on investment out of your subscription would be difficult at best.  There are advantages in instances where you are in situations like being a student and you need a certain book (BookSwim also offers textbook rentals via a partnership with Chegg.com), you live in a small town with no library, you are shut in for some reason and so on.  Even at this though, the monthly memberships range from $9.95  a month to $59.95 a month, so it still seems hard to believe that very many people will ever be able to use this service enough to get their monies worth out of it.

With the explosion of e-readers that allow for instantaneous book delivery, and even some allowing for you to loan books to friends, as well as huge collections of free books you can read, this service is just a bit lost on us.  We see a lot of value in the textbook rental service for college students, but as we said, that is done with a partnership with Chegg.com, so you can just go through them directly.

If you love BookSwim, and find it useful, more power to you, but we have to say we don’t picture this site having an extremely long life.