A Netflix for Physical Books is Possible (and Desirable)
(n.b, this isn’t a response to that — presumably, I didn’t read it — bad forbes article about amazon and libraries that keeps on popping up today.)
Yesterday, I went to a charity shop and bought Chavs by Owen Jones and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for 50p each. In a dedicated second-hand bookshop around here they would cost, I guess, £3.50; on amazon, you could get them for about £2.81.
Charity shops underprice decent books which are worth reading, presumably because the stock of a charity shop is so heterogeneous (this one had clothes, furniture, some electrics, and DVDs, in addition to books) that the staff can’t be expected to know the true prices of all their products, and so they just set all books at the same price, rather than, say, looking up and then pricing each item based on amazon’s prices, which would take time they don’t have.
What this means is that one could (indeed I have) acquire(d) a decent enough collection of decent enough books for quite cheap. Let’s say, somewhat arbitrarily, but based on my experience, that you could get 50 decent books for £60.
That could form the basis of a curated, remote, book library that functioned like Netflix did for DVDs in the early years of the millennium. People pay a small fee, basically just enough to cover postage, and they can get books sent out to them, and when they’re done, they return them.
This would be a really cool thing, in my view. The reason for this is that it would overcome something which is a big problem with our consumption of media, namely the paralysis of choice and the problems of the recommender algorithms that shape our lives. Walk into any bookshop, new or secondhand, or a library, and one will be quickly overwhelmed by choice, and although browsing is certainly fun, it’s hard to imagine that on leaving the shop or library with one’s purchases or loans (since, as is familiar, it’s obligatory that one leave with a book if one enters a place with books) one has made an optimal decision.
(Think about your most recent big discovery: someone who’s been writing for years underrecognised, who is exactly the sort of writer you like, and yet whom you went years and maybe decades without hearing about. For example, every time I went to a bookshop in the last decade and bought a novel that wasn’t by this person (Helen DeWitt or Greg Egan for me, fwiw), I did worse than I could have done with more knowledge.)
But if browsing has problems, the way media gets served to us online also has problems (and unlike browsing, it isn’t fun). This is something that I notice particularly clearly when I’m searching for the shitty pop I like to listen while running on a treadmill. Type in an artist and you’ll get their most popular song; so will everybody else, and assuming most people are lazy and time-pressed, they’ll listen to the most popular song, and that will feed forward so that that song is even more likely to be recommended to someone next time, and a massive inequality opens up where, say, Shake It Off receives billions of views while some other song that might be just as good but which I’ve never heard of and thus can’t give you the name of doesn’t (the same sort of snowball effect applies to tv, newspaper articles, even tweets).
Ditto for literature. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a useful recommendation in amazon’s recommended for you, or customers who bought this also bought. Instead, I get my book recommendations, for the most part, from blogs and twitter. In a sense, I outsource my reading list to experts: I listen to this person when they recommend recent American fiction, this person when they recommend sci-fi, this person politics, this person economics, this person pop science, and so on.
My envisaged Netflix of books would take this deferring to experts bit a step further: you would actually get the physical books from the same person you get the recommendations from. You trust them to send you out some titles that they think you should read, you read them, and return them.
(This requires that the books the recommenders want to recommend be available for cheap in charity shops. This often won’t be the case, but it often will. I am constantly surprised by the quality of books in charity shops.)
It would be fun both to be the recommender and the recommendee. I buy a lot of books in charity shops, read a lot of them, and would like share the knowledge I’ve gained. At the same time my perspective is limited and would be made richer by that of others.
It’s even, surprisingly, somewhat financially viable. You’d never make any interesting money out of it, but you wouldn’t lose money and if you agree with me that it would be culturally enriching and that not everything is done for money, that shouldn’t be an obstacle.
(Wait — it’s somewhat financially viable? I think so. Royal Mail, if the website isn’t misleading me, lets you send a small package, which could contain up to three books, second-class, for about £3. Doing that x2 is £6; a package looks to be about 30p. Working out the rest of the details turns on various interesting (if you’re interested in boring things, like I am) questions about scale and flow and the extent to which people would use the service, but a not ridiculous figure would be £8 for a loan of three books. Which isn’t awful — we pay £7 or something a month for Netflix, which isn’t curated, a fact which results, as is well known, in people scrolling for ages only to rewatch an episode of The Office.)
But wait again — in most of these cases, you could buy the books off amazon for £2.81. Or, you could borrow them from the library for free. Why would someone rent some books when they could just buy them for cheaper or again borrow them for free? Well, but the whole point is they couldn’t do this, because the whole point is that the recommender introduces you to books that weren’t previously on your radar, and you can’t buy a book if you don’t know what it is. What you’re buying is the recommendation (and the postage costs to realise the recommendation). If you want to be your own recommender, fair enough, but that requires significant outlay of time and effort to find and buy good books.
But wait yet a third time — instead of this whole culturally-enriching lending knowledge-sharing thing couldn’t one make this a business? Go to charity shops, get cheap books, send them out in threes at a minimum, charging £7, undercutting amazon at that scale and making a couple of pounds per transaction? No, I don’t think one could — the time it would take to find the books, to go to distant charity shops, and so on, would make it financially unviable almost always.)
None of this is to diss libraries or bookshops, both of which are very dear to my heart. What it is is to find a way to read better books and share knowledge by taking advantage of other people’s recommendations, and use our private libraries (and the surprising cheapness of both buying books from charity shops and sending books in threes) — which often go untouched for long periods — more efficiently for the common good.
