With the concept of sharing economy booming in China, many industries have been inspired to search for opportunities to make a leap, in the hope of becoming the next Mobike or Ofo, which have become an overnight success by promoting sharing bikes.

A platform named “Jieshuren,” or “book-borrower” has recently attracted public attention, with services aiming to build a sharing library.

Jieshuren provides various kinds of books on its platform for readers to choose from. Readers will be charged for a certain amount of service fees for borrowing the books they like. They also need to put a deposit equal to the price of the books they borrowed while they rent them, and could withdraw the sum after returning the books.

Readers were also encouraged to pay damage fees while returning the books, which are not mandatory.

The platform was started by Chen Dongzan, who was a bookstore owner in Harbin city, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province a decade ago. He launched the platform in March 2016, and now leases about 2,000 books each month.

Chen said he is trying to find a convenient model for readers between buying books in stores and borrowing them from traditional libraries. The former costs a lot of money and has little long-time utility, while the latter costs too much time, which is not efficient enough.

“The more books people borrow, the more money they will save,” said Chen, explaining how his model will benefit the readers. He added that readers could keep the books as long as they need, without worrying about any deadline.

It is not the first time that sharing libraries appear in China. The early forms of sharing libraries usually adopted the idea of membership, and required only a certain sum of deposits while allowing their members to borrow books for free. “Borrowing for free is the reason of their decay,” said Chen.

Compared with sharing libraries in the early 2010s, all the money related to borrowing from Jieshuren were paid by the subscribers. For now, they buy books using the deposit money, and profit from the service fees. Chen said the platform has little pressure in terms of capital, but it still too early to profit.

Talking about Jieshuren’s future development, Chen said it is crucial to find a way to allocate all the unused books in society and lend them to those who want to read them. 

The Jieshuren platform has now been considering opening warehouses in the Yangtze River delta where more readers gather and the delivery fees are much lower. 

Being a voracious reader himself, Chen said his goal for the platform is to have up to 10,000 fixed subscribers and a store of up to three million books, which would allow each family to have a bookshelf of 300 books from their platform.

“By then, people could exchange their borrowed books within their communities, and children growing up in such environment will certainly love reading books,” said Chen.

(Based on a report by Beijing Youth Daily)