An avid reader, IT consultant Shilpa Srivastava reads several titles simultaneously. But her method of borrowing books has changed over the past one year. She no more visits the local library — instead, she has moved to home delivery.

Maisra Malik, 32, a librarian herself and member of several others, also borrows books online.

At a time when public libraries are steadily losing readers, online book rental services, merely two years old as a business, are gaining customers in the city.

Ironically, however, the service came riding on the demise of a ‘real’ bookshop. In October 2007, Nidhi Verma, previously a professor in English at Indraprastha College for Women, decided to take the family business online after Ram Gopal Sharma and Son in Connaught Place, one of the city’s oldest rental bookshops, saw a massive dip in business. Verma says,

“My mother-in-law Manjula Sharma told me hardly any readers visited the shop to rent books. So we decided on this online venture.”

Now 31, Verma is the founder and managing director of the online rental ‘Book Me A Book’.

Then there’s Arti Jain and Manish Kumar, both 34, who founded the ‘Friends of Books’ online rental book service in their apartment in East Delhi’s Patparganj. The couple left their jobs in the US and began the venture last September.

Jain says they thought they were the first to rent books online in Delhi but came to know about ‘Book Me A Book’ at the Delhi Book Fair later.

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