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by tracker1 1169 days ago
Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail. Similar to Netflix original dvd model, but for books. An annual membership fee of like $20/yr to help maintain storage infrastructure. Then ship those books to/from people in reusable boxes for bigger/unwieldy books or padded envelopes if that's sufficient for less expensive paperback.

Small per-lend fee to cover the shipping cost, with a return window or followup fee per N days... days determined based on the size/pages in the book/volume.

With efforts to work with various local libraries to handle some of the distribution closer to the people.
3 comments
jhbadger 1169 days ago
Everything old is new again. That's literally how for-profit subscription libraries (which often used to also ship books to people too far away to visit the physical library) used to work in the 18th and 19th century prior to widespread public libraries. The existence of these libraries even influenced the style of novels at the time. Because each volume was treated as a separate rental, novels became longer and longer so that they could be split across multiple volumes (most typically 3).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscription_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel

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causi 1169 days ago
I don't see how the shipping costs could ever be low enough for that to make sense. Even after my organization's massive UPS discounts, shipping a paperback one state over still costs $4.30. Would you rather spend five bucks to rent a used book or fifteen to buy a new one?
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boomboomsubban 1169 days ago
USPS offers media and library rates, which goes as low as $2.20 for any zone. That'd still be $4.40 round trip though.
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legitimayzer 1168 days ago
> Might be interesting to start a large "online library" that does physical books by mail.

but this changes everything. My whole point (which you seem to have ignored) is that when dealing with physical goods, then the systems (traditions, institutions) already in place work fine.

But why would I do that when I can give the PDF version to everybody due to ZERO distribution costs? (not marginal costs, even less. zero costs once the PDFs are made).

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