Book of the Month Club

by
Scott D. Parker

I received a strange thing in the mail the other day: an invitation to the Book-of-the-Month (BOMC) club. The club isn’t odd. Far from it. I remember back in the day avidly scanning the catalogs of books I could get for a dollar each! It was a bibliophile’s dream. Not only would you get the latest hardbacks (for a dollar; did I mention that?), but you could double-up you points and get something in a slipcase. Tis how I got my hardback version of The Hobbit. I would pore over that catalog, getting my top 15, then paring it down to my top 10, and, finally, writing the numbers of my top 5 there on the card. You’d mail a thin piece of paper and, later, you’d get a big box in the mail. It was awesome.

What surprised me is that the BOMC is still around and making their pitch via a mailer. I forget that, for a large majority of the folks out there, paper books are still the go-to reading medium. As someone who has (mostly) made the paradigm shift to ebooks, where all the books hover between $4.00 and $14.00, it just surprised me that BOMC is still around and making their pitch via paper. That is, I expected them to be online, perhaps, and still have their service available to readers, just that those readers would have to go online to order paper books. I know it’s not an earth-shattering idea, but it still struck me as funny.

I wonder if there’s an ebook version of BOMC? A quick check of their website revealed a “no” on ebooks. I wonder how that’d work? Would they send you a epub (or whatever) file every month that would be readable in an app they created? If you want the title, you pay for it and the code gets removed? If you didn’t, the file would “close” after 7 days? Is that even feasible? I dunno, but it’s an interesting idea.

Anyone still a member of the BOMC?