Modern day libraries with a technological facelift

A voracious reader, 30-year-old Rahul Nayak who has a collection of over 500 books of different genres was looking for online libraries when he stumbled on Linkshelf app on Google playstore and ordered what he thought was an e-book. Pleasantly surprised to receive a physical copy of the book delivered at his door step, Nayak was more delighted to know that the book he rented was not from a library, but from another Linkshelf user.

Connecting borrowers to lenders, Linkshelf allows users to list books they are willing to rent, pick them up and deliver them to the readers who are interested in reading them. Nayak says he rents a new book almost every week and has listed most of his own collection on their website making it available for other readers.

Avid readers themselves, Linkshelf co-founders Kushal Jain and Meet Maharana had over 400 books of their own and realized that there must be many people out there like them.

“If we could bring together all those books that were lying in shelves of people’s homes and link them on a single platform, it could be bigger than any library,” says Jain explaining the inception of their idea.

Anticipating an initial resistance among people to share books with strangers, Jain says they started with renting out books from their own collection. Currently operational only in Bengaluru, Linkshelf has about 670 user registrations and about 1000 unique book titles on the website shared by users since July.

However, there is still a fair amount of resistance in terms of people willing to share books, which remains a challenge, says Jain. Moving away from conventional library subscriptions that people opted for longer duration, such as six months or a year, reading as a habit has evolved into an on-demand pattern.

“Technology allows a lot of experimentation in reading these days. Although I have a Kindle and I read on it when I travel, renting out a paper book, gives better experience at a lower cost,” says Gaurav Upadhyay, a scientist at ISRO and a Linkshelf user.

“In fact, while renting I can experiment with reading genres and order books I wouldn’t have bought otherwise,” he says.

A rent-on-demand model allows readers to rent books in down time, giving more control and convenience to readers. The current model of Linkshelf allows users to rent books for seven, 15, 30 or 45 days. Renting for 15 days is currently free, but chargeable at ' 90 for 15 to 30 days and '. 120 for 30 to 45 days. It also allows a week long extension of renting period for ' 50.

An incentive for app users to lend books, Linkshelf shares a certain amount of fee received from renter with the lender.

Makeover for neighborhood libraries

Modern day libraries in resonance with the culture have adopted technology to their aid. JustBooks, a classic neighborhood library with a sleek makeover that allowed users to rent, read and return books across a chain of stores is an example of it.

With their network of libraries across cities enabled with radio-frequency identification devices, JustBooks caters to relatively modern day readers. Asked if readers are increasingly moving from pulp to pixels, Sundar Rajan, founder of JustBooks says, e-reading caters more to a different variety of audience.

“For our young readers we haven’t seen a lot of shift to digital reading. Also fiction readers prefer renting a book, over buying e-copies,” Rajan says.

Rajan admits that many JustBooks readers are increasingly ordering books from the company’s website and asking for home deliveries. Serving to their “25 percent customer base which is online,” JustBooks will be launching an app with wishlist and recommendation list for users, he said.

Sensing the need for convenience, conventional libraries have also launched websites and added a door step delivery and pick up facilities for readers. A physical library offering packages specially designed for kids, Easy Library that has been in Koramangala, Bengaluru’s renowned neighborhood for 13 years recently revamped their marketing model by franchising, launching a website and adding home delivery as a service.