Routine Order

Like I said earlier, a plan is in the making for a trip to Europe. I am planning to visit France while I am at it. In addition to the site I mentioned in the earlier post, I found a good listing of France car hire options at francethisway.com. In addition to that, francethisway.com also has listings for Gites. What’s a Gite, you ask? Here’s an appetizer:


Simple put, a gite is a house that you can rent for an extended period. Some call them vacation property. Some of the gites in France look really inviting. I wish I could stay there for a month, instead of the week or two that I plan on spending in France. Make that a week or two of driving. I wonder why we don’t have the equivalent of Gites here in the US. If they’re here, they’re really hard to find. Remember that movie with Drew Barrymore and that girl from the Titanic where they swap homes for the holiday season? I forget the name, and I really have to finish writing this soon. Something like that in real life would be awesome.

In the US it is relatively easier to find great deals on car rentals when you are planning your travel. In planning for a Europe trip, I found that it is not so easy to find a website that gives you all the deals up front for different countries. Of course there are the big-ticket sites but how do I know they are specialists in Europe? Well, finally I found a car rental site, though the European’s seem to prefer calling it “Car Hire” instead

I expect to need a car for use in the UK, France and Spain, and it is kind of neat that Argus has seperate pages for car hire UK, car hire France and car hire Spain. I sort of wish there was a way I could hire a car in France and return it in Barcelona, Spain. Maybe I should give Argus Car Hire a call and find out if that is possible. They do have a couple of numbers in the US, so its easy enough. The company says it’s been around since 1996 - they must surely have figured out a way to do what I want

BookSwim promises an online book rental service that works like Netflix does. I am wondering if it will get off the ground, as much as whether it will be successful.

1. Books have a much lesser audience these days
2. There are a lot more books than Movies released every year
3. Readers have pretty specific tastes, especially when it comes to non-fiction — where a person might want to read books on something that might sound obscure to me
4. Books might just cost more than DVDs in some case - think hundreds of dollars
5. Books have a limited re-usable life after which they get dog-eared, torn, ripped etc
6. Unethical customers might tear out a page - making the book un-reusable
7. Libraries are still alive and kicking
8. It takes 3 hours to watch a movie, around 3 days to read a book - so subscribers get less “value” per dollar with books, for the same subscription amount - how much cheaper will bookswim be, and how will hey manage it?

Considering all these factors it is difficult to see how they will make any profit, given the no-late-fees, free-postage deal they are offering. The site is set to launch this first quarter of 2007, but it looks like they are still looking for financers. There is a brochure touching upon why bookswim is an appealing idea, but it is superficial in some respects.

Thanks to the distant librarian who brought this in my field of view. The site he links to has some commetary too.

I’ll have to wait and see what rates and benefits they offer before signing up - owning a good book is still pretty high on my list of priorities, so renting a book does not seem too attractive - if I like the book, I’ll probably end up buying it, so it would be neat if bookswim offered the possibility of renting-to-own, for a small additional price.