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.

Verma, sitting in the cramped upper compartment of the 50-year-old bookshop amid old, yellowed copies alongside new glazed titles, says, “Our online rental book service is aimed at people with time constraint, who like to read but can’t go to a library or a bookshop.” One section is stacked with graphic novels and comics that Verma, who spends a good deal of time in the bookshop, says are much in demand.

While bestsellers and titles by authors like Paulo Coelho and chick-lit novels are the obvious in-demand books, Verma says equally sought after is Truman Capote’s ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That aside, Salman Rushdie, Mohsin Hamid and, more recently, Arvind Adiga are also popular among the And the title ‘How to kill your husband and other household hints’? “It is very famous and very much in demand,” Verma says with a chuckle. 

Book Me A Book has a warehouse that stores around 12,000 books, including several multiple copies — many of them yet to be catalogued. “On an average, we rent out 60-odd books per day and the numbers are increasing every day.”

Avoiding the rat race

Filmmaker Arti Jain and her software engineer partner Manish Kumar, meanwhile, began their venture since they wanted to do “something of our own and not fall in the usual rat race”, as Jain puts it. Currently living on their previous savings as their present job is not a profitable business yet, the couple says they are happy to be doing what they wanted to.

Their ‘Friends of Books’ has more than 3,500 titles neatly stacked in polished cupboards in one of their apartment rooms turned into an office. “We want to expand and are currently getting more books but we handpick them carefully,” Jain says.

Both online rental services have a tie-up with local courier services who pick and drop the books to and from customers’ houses in Delhi and NCR.