THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409090623
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Jim and Mary Collins of Great Bridge in Chesapeake do a lot of traveling in a typical week - in space and in time.
He's an advertising executive. She's event coordinator for the city of Norfolk. They keep their eyes on the road and their minds on adventure.
``I listen to audio books when I go to work,'' says Mary, 42. ``He listens to them when he's traveling. On vacation, we listen to them lying by the pool.''
``I've turned my brother-in-law from Raleigh on to it,'' reports Jim, 43, ``and my sister, who's coming up from Key West.''
Their major source for audio transport is BookLender at Regency Hilltop Shopping Center in Virginia Beach. They make the hour round trip from their Great Bridge home a family ritual. It saves them money.
Audio books routinely cost around $17 for a two-cassette package, and sales are up. Time magazine reports that retail sales reached $1.2 billion in 1993, up 40 percent from the year before. But BookLender, a new kind of bookstore celebrating its first anniversary, rents, instead of sells, brand-new books and audio books for nominal fees.
When these books are no longer new, BookLender sells them cut-rate to make room for current stock.
Example: Creepster Stephen King's Needful Things sells for $22.95 in hardcover, $49.95 for the 18-hour tape. BookLender rented the book for six months, marked it down to $5.99 and unloaded it as a useful doorstop.
``These are the books on the bestseller lists,'' reports owner Ann Winston, ``the ones the authors of which you see on all the talk shows and `Oprah.' ''
Her operation is a lending library for folks who want new titles now but don't want to purchase them outright. If one decides to buy, the rental fee is applied to the purchase price. Winston even supplies return mailers for out-of-towners and takes orders on an 800 number.
BookLender reduces the kind of conventional library frustration that Winston experienced, which prompted her to start the store in the first place. Library acquisition budgets have been down in recent years; cities such as Norfolk have put the financial squeeze on the last best bargain in America. The result has been that old books abound, but many new titles are tough for patrons to come by.
``I was number 286 on the Virginia Beach Public Library waiting list for The Pelican Brief,'' recalls the proprietor. ``I simply couldn't get the books I wanted without buying them. And, being an inveterate English major, I was buying too many.''
So Ann and her husband, York, a Virginia Beach obstetrician/gynecologist, got their heads together and, in solving her problem, helped solve those of others.
Their biggest surprise was the enthusiasm of customers for audio books. They only stocked a few when BookLender opened, but the overwhelming demand led them to expand to the point that new audio books now comprise half of their rolling 4,000-title inventory.
So not only can you acquire (for a typical rental of $3.99 a week, $5.99 for two weeks or $7.98 for three) such entertaining reading as Donald E. Westlake's Don't Ask, Anne Rice's Lasher or David Poyer's Winter in the Heart, you can hear John Grisham's The Client, read by Blair Brown. You can hear James Waller narrate his The Bridges of Madison County, with the (considerable) assistance of Ben Kingsley and Isabella Rossellini.
The pale violet walls of BookLender are divided into such intriguing categories as Fiction, Business, Health and Fitness, Psychology, Humor (Carl Reiner reads Groucho Marx!), Kids' Audio, Biography, History and Cooking. Winston, a former middle-school English teacher from Henrico County and the mother of three, considers herself promoted to glory.
``I'm surrounded by books,'' she exults, ``and nice people.''
Among them are audiophile regulars Jim and Mary Collins. Think of the possibilities. BookLender may be bringing a little closer that unimaginable day when Cormac McCarthy will boom as widely from automobiles on the expressway as Pearl Jam. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB