There’s not many people that can read an entire book in your typical flight time. An average flight is what? 3-4 hours long? I’m a pretty quick reader, but I wouldn’t be able to read an entire novel in that time.
I don’t know. If you’re bored enough, you’ll teach yourself how to speed-read just to keep from strangling the guy in front of you who leans his seat back all the way and snores. I read all 450-500 pages of Hunt for Red October over a five hour flight. I mean, sure, it’s Clancy, but still, it’s about 500 pages of Clancy back when he was, you know, good.
You might be able to read a 500 page book in 5 hours, but I don’t think most people can. Besides, a 5 hour flight is just short of a cross country flight. Most flights are shorter than that. If you had a 4 hour flight you’d have to return the book without reading the last 100 pages or so. To me that’s a deal breaker.
Now, THAT is a good idea. Except that I’m not sure if you can take laptops and PDAs onto planes anymore. But if you could, that’s a great idea; charge something really cheap like $1 or $2 for an e-book. Of course, it’s the airport so it’d probably wind up being something like $10, when you could just use their wi-fi for $2 an hour and download it yourself (or, if your airport has AT&T WiFi and you subscribe to AT&T’s wifi service for $2 a month, free - like I get).
~Tasha
Because:
- the rent charged in airports is too high, much more than a typical bookstore pays.
- many customers in an airport would be rushed, with no time for the casual browsing that generates most of the sales in bookstores.
Some airports have (or had) full bookstores in them. But a lot of them have gone under, or are doing rather poorly compared to bookstores elsewhere.
FTR
SFO as a full bookstore in it. (Near the United terminal)
LAX terminal 7 just got a book store in the last year
PDX (Portland Ore) has Powells Books
Sure you can, it’s not a problem. But why not download what you need before you get to the airport?
The problem here, as I see it, is that you have a solution and you’re looking for a problem. There’s already bookstores and magazine stands in airports that seem to be meeting the needs of the flying community. These stores have added features that mimic the best parts of a lending library. And airlines are adding personalized TV, movie, and music services in the seatbacks so there’s less and less need for reading material.
Another chime in from an SO: I told my girlfriend about this idea and she told me that they actually have a service similar to this with a Greek airline, except it’s DVD and not books. You pay a flat monthly rate and you can borrow and return a DVD as many times as you’d like and they have these stations in a couple of terminals in Greece. Sort of like a Netflix for airports.
Yes, they have that with DVD players and movies in the US too. You can rent a little DVD player and a couple movies, then return it when you deplane. If you deplane at an airport where they don’t have a branch, you can use a two-day UPS return, for which they provide an large pre-addressed envelope. I used one of these 5 years ago.
I seem to recall RDU airport having a small shelf of swappable, take-one-leave-one paperbacks outside a bookstore in that airport, but that was over 15 years ago.
Over twenty years ago now when I began to travel the shoestring trail through SE Asia and the Indian sub continent, there was such a service - of sorts. Where ever travellers gathered there would be a second hand bookstore or lending library, where you could trade back the books for half off, or just other books you had. Now in the beginning there wasn’t a lot of selection but it sort of grew quite quickly. Usually they would have a rubber stamp inside the book somewhere with the name of the bookstore or lending library.
It was quite a brilliant system really, you knew when you got to your destination there would be a place with the same deal. It was not unusual to find yourself reading a book in Kathmandu and see a stamp in the back from a second hand bookstore in Bali or a lending library in Thailand.
As it happens my first exposure to the Straight Dope was just such a book, in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Three years later I found another one in Kathmandu. Both went right back into the mix once I’d read them.
As the volume of tourists increased these places were overtaken with stores selling expensive new books only, and the lending libraries at the beaches became all trashy romance novels - by the boatload. But I’m glad I remember a time when there was just a guy on the beach with a card table, maybe 3 dozen books and a sign saying, ‘lending library’. 
What about an e-library? You “check” out an e-book to read on your laptop? For the average person, some sort of protection against making copies and a set time-limit (a couple days or a week, just like a normal book would be), would keep it manageable.
You might want to check with your local library. I know my local library has that kind of service already. Of course, it’s time-limited DRMed, and can only be used on Windows computers and some absurd portable players. Hopefully they’ll figure out how to let the majority of people with digital players (who have iPods) play them, soon.